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I do somehow because of my inherent interest in understanding the world. However, this got me intro communication issues with my former boss. Apparently, this

by mo_42 3y ago

I do somehow because of my inherent interest in understanding the world. However, this got me intro communication issues with my former boss. Apparently, this person was not interested in what words (or combinations of words) actually mean but rather simply just how they're used frequently. Every new combination of words was utterly confusing to this person. As a conclusion, I try to figure out how people process language and adapt accordingly. In my experience, most people don't see language as a coherent system of words with meaning.

HPsquared 3y ago
Most people are still on step 1 (learning what the individual words mean). They don't get to the stage of learning how the different words fit together.
- atian 3y ago
  I put quotes around words to differentiate when I’m using them incorrectly but popularly. By definition the goalpost has also been shifted.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  Y'all are insufferable good lord. People know how the words fit together. Everyone speaks fine. Not everyone needs to be a big gas etymology nerd about it and in fact nerdly insistence on what a word "actually" means contra its everyday use is an extremely common error. One that wouldn't be made by someone with even the slightest interest in the domain of linguistics, rather than just feeling smarter than people.
roenxi 3y ago
If you're interested in that sort of thing, on mental model that makes sense is people keep a little blob of context in their head, and use the words coming in to update the blob. Then at the end of the sentence they guess what you meant and respond to that, blind to what you was actually said as the tape recorder hears it. Which would be a very sensible way of working for people who don't have a lot of short term memory to play with, since remembering a complex sentence to parse is impossible. But it makes it challenging to process words as though they have inherent meaning, because they are really acting as deltas to some state. The precise meaning of the word cannot be preserved because it is conflated with the sentence as a whole. You see that abused a lot in politics, where people say one thing in a way that means what they say and the impression they give are different. So if trends go one way they supported the trend, and if the trends go the other way then they never actually said anything in support. I'll probably get away with pointing at Trump as an interesting example of that in reverse where his sentences usually don't make sense if you try to interpret them as sentences, but are crystal clear as a series of updates to some blob of state.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Kind of like garden path sentences. Famous garden path sentences like "the old man the boat" are crafted to parse to obvious nonsense on the first iteration, forcing the reader to do backtracking. But when proofreading texts it's not uncommon to find unintentional garden path sentences that are easy to misunderstand, especially in English. Some politicians are great at doing that on purpose. But crafting sentences that only make sense on first parsing but are actually nonsense on second glance is kind of next level, some kind of inverse garden path sentence.
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
> coherent That's another one that's useful to think about: it's the same "-herent" as "adherent" and "inherent". One means "stick together", one means "stick to" and the other means "sticks into" (I.e. is part of). "Hesitate" comes from the same root and means "stick in place".
DataDaoDe 3y ago
In linguistics, there is a saying coined by Firth, “You will know a word by the company it keeps.” The idea is that a words meaning is embedded in all the contexts in which it occurs. This is how virtually everyone processes the semantics of words. Meaning and contexts vary with time and person and can lead to many misunderstandings.

by mo_42 3y ago

HPsquared 3y ago

Most people are still on step 1 (learning what the individual words mean). They don't get to the stage of learning how the different words fit together.

atian 3y ago
I put quotes around words to differentiate when I’m using them incorrectly but popularly. By definition the goalpost has also been shifted.
giraffe_lady 3y ago
Y'all are insufferable good lord. People know how the words fit together. Everyone speaks fine. Not everyone needs to be a big gas etymology nerd about it and in fact nerdly insistence on what a word "actually" means contra its everyday use is an extremely common error. One that wouldn't be made by someone with even the slightest interest in the domain of linguistics, rather than just feeling smarter than people.

roenxi 3y ago

If you're interested in that sort of thing, on mental model that makes sense is people keep a little blob of context in their head, and use the words coming in to update the blob. Then at the end of the sentence they guess what you meant and respond to that, blind to what you was actually said as the tape recorder hears it. Which would be a very sensible way of working for people who don't have a lot of short term memory to play with, since remembering a complex sentence to parse is impossible. But it makes it challenging to process words as though they have inherent meaning, because they are really acting as deltas to some state. The precise meaning of the word cannot be preserved because it is conflated with the sentence as a whole. You see that abused a lot in politics, where people say one thing in a way that means what they say and the impression they give are different. So if trends go one way they supported the trend, and if the trends go the other way then they never actually said anything in support. I'll probably get away with pointing at Trump as an interesting example of that in reverse where his sentences usually don't make sense if you try to interpret them as sentences, but are crystal clear as a series of updates to some blob of state.

wongarsu 3y ago
Kind of like garden path sentences. Famous garden path sentences like "the old man the boat" are crafted to parse to obvious nonsense on the first iteration, forcing the reader to do backtracking. But when proofreading texts it's not uncommon to find unintentional garden path sentences that are easy to misunderstand, especially in English. Some politicians are great at doing that on purpose. But crafting sentences that only make sense on first parsing but are actually nonsense on second glance is kind of next level, some kind of inverse garden path sentence.

adhesive_wombat 3y ago

> coherent That's another one that's useful to think about: it's the same "-herent" as "adherent" and "inherent". One means "stick together", one means "stick to" and the other means "sticks into" (I.e. is part of). "Hesitate" comes from the same root and means "stick in place".

DataDaoDe 3y ago

In linguistics, there is a saying coined by Firth, “You will know a word by the company it keeps.” The idea is that a words meaning is embedded in all the contexts in which it occurs. This is how virtually everyone processes the semantics of words. Meaning and contexts vary with time and person and can lead to many misunderstandings.