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That's a feature. Human words are supposed to be flexible. Re-defining and re-shaping them is a key way that we evolve as a society. Insisting that everyone in
by px43 4y ago
That's a feature. Human words are supposed to be flexible. Re-defining and re-shaping them is a key way that we evolve as a society.
Insisting that everyone in the room uses the same definitions for all words, and trying to force some mono-mind of language, rather than actually working to solve problems is counterproductive. It can be productive to discuss and understand how terms are being used differently by different parties, and it is absolutely necessary for everyone in the room to understand that words are different for different people, but then you have to actually start working on the shared problems.
It's incredibly frustrating when people waste everyone's time trying to come up with a completely new shared "compromise vocabulary" that no one is happy with and will get discarded the moment people leave the room.
- netizen-936824 4y agoThe problem could be solved by simply discussing definitions at the start of a debate, there's no need to come up with new vocabulary.
- MereInterest 4y agoHuman words should change over time, as that helps communication. However, human words varying across participants of the same conversation drastically harms understanding. As a non-political example, the first time I heard the term "server-side rendering", I thought it was one of the soonest ideas I had ever heard. With the latency between client and server, needing to go back to the server for every screen draw would make for an incredibly laggy interface. I hadn't known that JavaScript developers use "rendering" to refer to making HTML, whereas I associate it only with making an image to be displayed. Because there was no shared definition, communication was harmed.