Even acknowledging that your #1 and #2 breakdown of my assertions is accurate, I’m still bewildered by this statement. My “behavior”? Trying simply to explain the validity of your point #1, which you acknowledge as accurate, while being viciously attacked from all sides? What behavior of mine was out of line? Colibri insisted I was 100%, pittably wrong. You acknowledge that’s not the case; it took me two years to gain that acknowledgment. Colibri is the one who “refused to admit he was wrong,” and pitted me when my initial point–despite the unclarity of later attempts at explication–was, as acknowledged by you, correct. The out of line behavior I see is Colibri’s, not mine. As to the other phrases you needed to decontextualize before you could call them wrong–(“Castilian” is slightly better than “Spanish” in an obscure semantic technical precise pedantic official way.)–well, when the obscure semantic technical precise pedantic official context is simply and only the relevant phrase in the Spanish constitution, which is all I was ever addressing, then no, it’s *not *false.
Or, “Depending on the context, ‘Spanish’ is open to a degree of ambiguity,” this is also true, in the constitutional context, as explained by my secondary cites above, dismissed by you as “hyper literal,” which I acknowledge, but I don’t see how that means “wrong.” In the same limited constitutional context, “‘Castilian is the official language of Spain’ is 100% accurate.” is also true.
But I agree that " ‘Spanish is the official language of Spain’ is somewhat less so, depending on context," is more problematic, because outside of the single, textual example of the constitution, “Spanish is the official language of Spain” is of course perfectly accurate.
You say, “Both statements about the lack of precision in the word “Spanish” were utterly and completely false, since “Spanish” was a noun in both contexts.” I’m sorry I was unclear, because in the first instance I was addressing the reason that “Castilian” seems to be the preferred official translation of that phrase in the constitution, which is that the adjective “Spanish,” not the noun as you assumed I meant, could–in that constitutional context–add ambiguity due to the fact that there are three other languages spoken in the *Spanish *state.
In any case, you’ve made a very helpful contribution to this whole discussion by highlighting where I was most unclear, and affirming where I was accurate (which was never meant to be more than the narrowest official context of the Spanish constitution).
Unfortunately, due to the fact that he has two years of vitriol invested in this “feud,” I don’t see Colibri acknowledging, as you have, that there was a narrow truth in what I was trying to say, even if further explication only clumsily served to cloud it further. Again, I feel that was partly due to the fact that Colibri, et al., insisted on keeping the discussion in the Pit, where they knew that I would never get a fair hearing.
Another point here: in live conversation, if someone says something unclearly, they’re allowed to clarify it and move on. In this typed-forever context, no matter how many times you try to clarify, someone can still scroll upthread and say, “but that’s not what you said, you originally said ___.” Whereas, partly I think because the discussion took place in the Pit, all of my pretty ordinary, everyday, conversational attempts at clarification were met with venomous accusations of lying. “That’s not what you said before, you’re just covering your ass,” or whatever. My clarifications were not taken as face value; on my original, hurried, sloppy, qualified statement was taken–oddly–as immutable gospel; it was decided by the crowd that that was the only time I really meant what I said; everything else was a self-justifying lie. That’s a pretty impossible situation for a discussion to develop intelligently and maturely. As you can see.
(See? Smiley!)