Sort of related to this earlier thread (about people correcting other people when it’s probably unnecessary); a related behaviour I have observed is arguing over definitions. Why do you do it?
I’m specifically talking about everyday settings where (in my view) strict definitions are probably unnecessary - so NOT things like definition of a process or phenomenon in science, or definition of a category of numbers in mathematics, just definition of things. For example:
People argue about the strict definition of what is a ‘pie’. Some people insist it’s only a pie if the filling is entirely encased in pastry (ie top and bottom crust), even though there are many examples of things called pies that comprise a filling in a dish, with a top crust only (pie definition pedants will say it’s not a pie, it’s a stew with a lid) and other examples of things called pies where there is only a bottom crust and a filling - such as pumpkin or pecan pie (again, pie definition pedants will argue this is definitely not a pie, it’s a tart, and that these are two mutually exclusive categories).
I will give my own definition of pie at the bottom of this post, but this thread isn’t for argument about definitions, it’s to discuss why people do this.
Are they joking or having fun? It often seems like they’re not, and other indicators in their spoken or written tone tend to suggest that in fact they feel some sort of duty to define things clearly. It’s very often unsolicited BTW.
Are you a definer like this? Why? Do you find yourself on the receiving end of definitional correction like this? What is your perception of it?
My pie definition: I myself actually have a very strict definition of ‘pies’; it is that set of things that people name ‘pies’. If it is called a pie, it’s a pie.
Without wanting to poison the discussion, my own perception of the ‘why’ of this is that it seems to be frequently correlated with intolerance in a wider sense. i.e. That thing is not a pie; those people should not be doing that thing.
Sometimes you need to be precise, as in logical argumentation. As for food, people have gone as far as to legally register traditional specialties. For example, there is a strict definition of what constitutes a Neapolitan pizza.
I’m occasionally guilty of this, e.g. “That’s not steam coming from the smokestack. That’s a mist. Steam is invisible.”
For some people, and for better or worse, I think there’s an innate desire to be “right.” We enjoy exactness in terminology, and I’m not sure why. Ego and arrogance? I admit it can get out of hand, and can be considered rude or insulting when the mistake is innocent and (most importantly) can’t cause harm.
It’s been a thing that annoys me for a long time, and when I read this quote in the amazing kidlit Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, something coalesced for me:
Gabi, I was noticing, was a very forgiving person. I’ve noticed sometimes smart people aren’t. They’re more interested in being right, being on top, and they think that means crushing the competition with their huge brains. But Gabi didn’t need to put others down to raise herself up.
People who correct definitions often seem to be treating life as a game of intellectual battle royale, where they’re determined to be the last one standing. It’s an approach that kills curiosity and understanding, not only for others, but also for themselves.
I am large and contain multitudes, and so there are some topics where I am free and easy with categorisation and get annoyed by people who rigorously defend definitions, and some areas where I get annoyed by what I thought to be a clear and obvious category being diluted and expanded by casual blurring of boundaries.
There are a few underlying motivations for this, none of which I think stem from a general disposition to intolerance (which is not to say that I am any kind of reference specimen for other strict definers).
Part of it is simply preferring to know what people are talking about. If I consider - based on the usage I have been exposed to up till now - that a given term - “floof”, let’s say - defines a category that includes w, x and y but not z, and other people consider that it does also include z, then that is mildly annoying because it means I can’t quite know when we speak of floof whether we are quite talking about the same thing. Now, I am not a monster - it may well be, and has been, that I simply adapt to this usage and find it more sensible, ultimately, to include z in my defnition of floof. But my first response is probably to say that no, z is no part of floof and people who say it is are messing with a perfectly good system.
To be more concrete, your pie example is a good one.
A stew with a pastry lid is not a pie. This is about knowing what we’re both talking about. I go into a pub for lunch and order the steak pie. I have an idea in my head of what I have ordered - hot-water or short-crust pastry encased steak and gravy. I am looking forward to it, and part of what I am looking forward to is the texture of the pastry mingling with the juices, the chewy mouthfeel and, frankly, the pleasant sensation of having eating quite a lot of calories. What I get is not that. A stew with puff pastry lid is quite like the pie I was expecting, but not the same and not the same in ways that I consider worse. If I had known that this is what I was getting, I might have ordered the fish and chips instead. (I also have a sneaking suspicion that the pub knows this very well. There are a lot of advantages to a kitchen of doing the stew with a lid version of a pie - rather than deal with blind baking and filling and sealing and so forth, you simplify the process and the time involved by putting stew in a dish, topping with puff pastry and putting in the oven for 10 minutes. That’;s good for them, and it serves their interest to expand the definition of a pie, but in doing so they have ever so slightly led me up the garden path.)*
Pizza pie. Some people do refer to pizza as pie. Per your definition, you would also consider pizza to be a species of pie, no less than steak and ale, or apple, or shepherd’s. But if you went to a restaurant and ordered a seafood pie and got frutti di mare pizza I think you would be at least surprised, and probably say something like “this isn’t what I ordered”.
*NB - I’m writing in the present tense for the sake of immediacy, but this is outdated now - the stew with a lid is now sufficiently common that I know what to expect - my definition of pie has expanded. But not in a way I’'m completely happy with, because ordering steak pie is now a bit of a crapshoot.
The other part of it, as @Crafter_Man says, that it’s born a desire to be right, and a childhood of being rewarded for knowing what words meant.
Hah! I took out a paragraph in my post above about “gifted child syndrome,” in part because I worried that people would start arguing about the definition (or existence) of the syndrome. That “childhood of being rewarded” for being smart is huge, and it’s a high that a lot of folks spend years of adulthood chasing.
I consider it a sign of personal growth that I have over time learned to identify situations where it is low stakes fun to discuss definitions (“Is a burrito a pie, the greatest thread in the history of forums”), situations where it useful (“When we say we are going to fund “employability skills” with this grant money, what is and isn’t covered by that term and can we please work this out now rather than after we’ve started processing applications”) and situations where it would be plain obnoxious showboating (“Well ackshually…”)
Did this personal growth come rather later than I would have liked, and only after one too many occasions of being a complete prick? I would rather not say.
This isn’t really the context in which the arguments seem to happen though - and also I think pretty much every pub menu I have ever seen had subtext describing the dish (i.e. ‘Tender beef steak and pork kidney in a rich ale gravy with a crisp puff pastry top’).
The context in which it more commonly happens, seems to be: someone shows off a pie they are rightly proud of making - it looks fantastic and they deserve to be proud of it - people should be talking about how good it looks, but instead, the conversation is dominated by an argument that it’s not actually a pie. This happens all the time on Reddit, for example (not just to me I should say, or even often to me because I now know better than to cast my pearls before swine).
This never happens. It is not in danger of happening. If it was in danger of happening, it would not be prevented by people gatekeeping the definition of pie. It is an imaginary problem, safeguarded by ineffective prevention.
I should also add, I think it’s perfectly fine if everyone is having fun. Is cereal soup? Is the earth a pie? (it is entirely enclosed by a crust). But it seems to spill over into people just being mean, for no good reason - and they themselves don’t even seem to be happy to be ‘right’.
This is down to people with poor social skills frankly. In some situations you get rewarded for vigorously defending your opinion about what pie is, and that feels good, so when you see an opportunity to repeat this performance in another context you jump at it, not realising that now you are just being obnoxious. It’s not unlike the way you can trigger a certain kind of person into making a stream of Monty Python or Little Britain quotes regardless of whether it’s the time or place just by mentioning moose, or rural gay people or whatever. It’s hard to be originally funny and interesting all the time, but we like the reward for it, and people fall back on what they know, often unaware or not caring about how inappropraite or rude it is.
Of course it doesn’t happen. It was made up to illustrate a point, which is that despite pizza often being called pizza pie, or deep dish pie etc, no one* actually thinks its included in the definition of pie because everybody polices the boundaries of terms at some point. And the reason you and I don’t consider pizza pie to be pie isn’t in the end going to be all that different from someone else’s reason to exclude open-topped fruit filled pastry cases. That’s no reason at all to be a prick to someone who has baked a nice one, but using words to refer to some stuff but others is, in the end, what we all do.
Oof. I’ve started using Reddit lately, and I’ve had to learn that some people got no home training. The most innocent, most benign question is invariably met with someone who drips with scorn and tells you how stupid you are for asking. “Intellectual battle royale” is absolutely a thing over there.
A big part of childhood is learning about the world, and a big part of learning about the world is learning how to name and classify and categorize the things in the world. This is a significant portion of what kids learn in school: These words are adjectives and those words are adverbs. These animals are mammals and those animals are birds. These books are fiction and those books are nonfiction. And so on.
When I was a child, I cared about strict definitions of things. I didn’t argue over what the definitions themselves should be; I assumed the definitions were official and set in stone. I was just careful not to call things by terms that didn’t officially apply, and it bothered me when other people did so. Spiders aren’t insects; and only one particular category of insects are bugs. Hawaiian Punch isn’t juice. Planets aren’t stars, but the sun is.
I genuinely don’t think I was trying to show how smart I was. I knew I was smart; everybody else knew I was smart; I had nothing to prove. I just think that learning how to categorize things correctly is one thing, but learning when it’s important to categorize things correctly vs. when it’s not so important to adhere to strict definitions involves a higher order of thinking, a higher level of intellectual maturity and perhaps social awareness, that I hadn’t grown into yet.
Fair enough. Boundaries do change though and honestly if I ordered a seafood pie and got something I considered more akin to a pizza, I think I would probably just relish the surprise.
The solution to any of this problem is (I think) not to desire to distill absolute meaning into a single word that already spans a broad and diverse domain. Shepherd’s pie, pork pie, pumpkin pie and stargazy pie are all very different things; if I blunderingly order one of those things (or some new thing that happens to include the term ‘pie’), in the expectation that it will be exactly like one of the others, that’s nobody’s fault but mine.
I do this periodically. I think I can readily identify 3 reasons. There may be more:
-With the pie example, I simply may wish to dispel my ignorance. I might ask, “What is the difference between a pie and a tart?” I find that sort of discussion interesting and entertaining, as it expands my personal knowledge. I’m not really “arguing” about it. Unless it gets to the point where I’ll good-naturedly say, “I’m gonna take a stand here…”. If the other peson does not wish to engage in such banter, I quickly let it drop.
-If someone uses a clearly incorrect word, I might think the individual would wish to know the correct word/definition. I only use this with people close to me whom I have reason to believe would not wish to express themselves incorrectly in other settings. My tendency is to err on the side of avoiding doing this.
-Sometimes it is simple confusion on my part. Here is an example: I’m a casual birder. Recently my wife said, “There is a red-headed woodpecker on the feeder.” Apparently she did not know that a Red-headed Woodpecker is a specific species of bird, which I have only seen a couple of times, and never in my yard. What are quite common around us - and what she saw - are Red-breasted Woodpeckers, the male of which has a lot of red on its head (and little-none on its breast.) As you might imagine, my questioning and her responses built somewhat to become mildly unpleasant - but reflected nothing more than a misunderstanding based on our unequal knowledge and experience WRT birds and their names.
I tend to value precise language use as I believe it enhances communication. I have always enjoyed language - speaking, writing and reading. (My wife and I are also both lawyers, a profession in which careful word choice and definition is critical. And in college I was on the debate team, where you start off by offering your definitions. To me, it is not at all offensive for someone to ask, “What exactly do you mean by x?”)
If someone I don’t particularly care about is saying something I’m not interested in, I’m happy for the communication to be vague. But with people I like and respect, I enjoy it when we use language in a reasonably precise manner.
