Precision in language simply isn’t always present right down at the level of single words, at least not in English. Most words have multiple meanings and even those separate meanings are often vague or fuzzy unless clarified by additional qualifying words.
I completely agree. Earnest, polite questions are seldom rude - it’s typically unsolicited assertions that are.
I think that humans are psychologically constructed in such a way that we prefer to sort everything into neatly defined, clearly distinct categories. Probably because while it’s an oversimplification, thinking of things that way makes getting through the day practical; you wouldn’t get much done if you spent all your time trying to microanalyze everything. If somebody asks you to open a window it’s wasteful to ponder if a door also counts as a window since both are holes in the wall; you know what they mean.
But when it’s just conversation or writing about it, people have more time to start overthinking how to fit things into those artificial categories; a never-ending process since the world isn’t actually constructed so neatly, there’s always things that don’t fit. Some people are just more passionate about it than others, for personal or emotional reasons or just have and agenda served by defining things a certain way (“That’s not true Whateveritism!”).
I admit to have not read the thread.
But the subject of “pie” is dear to me.
Both the fully pastry encased pie and the one where the pastry is only on top are pie. I mean, I have seen pies that only have a base and perhaps some latticed strips of pastry. And some that have a full top but no base.
I have made a Guiness and warthog pie, countless apple pies, a couple of Rabbit pies, beef pies, chicken pies.
I like pie.
I am a pie purist. But I do enjoy making tarts too. My rules with tarts are (ahem) a little looser.
That stuff is, IMO, when it’s not just industry lobbying, is sometimes Fascism-Lite™ - or at least it often looks like it to me - people using language about preserving tradition and culture, excluding outside influences, keeping things as they always were in the good old days, but often in doing so actually destroying nuance.
Case in point: The Cornish Pasty Association campaigned to get PDO status for the foodstuff of that name; they succeeded and now in order for something to be legally called a Cornish Pasty, it has to be made within the administrative county of Cornwall (OK, seems reasonable) and it has to be made including very specific ingredients and nothing else - pastry enclosing beef, potato, onion and swede(yellow turnip), seasoned only with salt and pepper and the pastry enclosing it must be crimped along the side - which also all seems reasonable on its face… but there are some significant adverse outcomes to this:
- It’s a low bar. Anyone can set up shop in Cornwall and make shitty pasties that minimally comply with the requirements, and label them authentic, and they are authentic. Ginsters is a brand of legally-authentic Cornish pasty that nearly everyone in Cornwall despises as inauthentic and poor, but there is nothing they can do about that.
- It has erased the diversity that existed before the PDO was granted; prior to the campaign, there were Cornish people in Cornwall, making their locally-traditional variations of the Cornish pasty, which used lamb instead of beef, which included different vegetables and different herbs and seasonings, or with a top crimp to better contain a little bit of sauce or gravy. Those local varieties are fewer now and they tend to get smacked down as ‘not proper’ by people who have just accepted the PDO definition as the absolute measure of tradition and authenticity. In some important ways Cornwall is poorer now for having the PDO.
And it’s easy just to say ‘well they chose that’, but they didn’t. The Cornish Pasty Association was a tiny, vocal group. Maybe if they had polled the entire population of Cornwall they would have still received a landslide approval for theith plan, then we could say ‘well, they chose that’.
If those self-imposed rules make you happy, more power to you. If you impose them on others, you deserve misery.
A random thought:
There are times when definitions shrink rather than expand. E.g “Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is of meat” confuses a lot of first time Romeo and Juliet readers because there is no meat in an egg, therefore surely Mercutio is saying that this guy’s head is empty of quarrels, right? But no, quite the reverse explains your teacher. Meat used to mean any kind of foodstuff, of which eggs are indeed full hence the choice of simile, but at some point came to mean only flesh. So during this process it was the strict-definers who were evolving language and the followers of the looser definitions who were holding it back. I wonder if that’s happened more often or if this case is practically a one-off.
I’m reminded of linguist Geoffrey Pullum’s commentary on the term “passive”:
Some writers seem to think that `passive’ means `contains an auxiliary verb’ or `contains a nominalization’; others are even more mysterious. Consider the entire array of constructions we have now seen mistaken for passives:
predicative complements (his health became impaired; was very sorry; is regrettable; was dead; responsible for…; above all the bloody reckoning; financial reform legislation becoming law)
simple active intransitives (bombs land; girls have died; mistakes happened; an error has occurred; led to tragic violence; it would end soon; served as…)
active intransitives with infinitival complements (turned out to be; began to stall failed to attribute a paragraph)
and most surprising of all, simple active transitives (changed careers; experienced a quick revival; implementing a program; duties included; actions emcompassed; misfortune… befell Germany; face a superior coalition; isolated Germany; clearing the Senate Judiciary Committee; allowed this story over race [to] bury one of the more consequential weeks of Obama’s presidency…)
No folk rhetorical property could yoke together this diverse array of constructions. What is going on is that people are simply tossing the term `passive’ around when they want to cast aspersions on pieces of writing that, for some ineffable reason, they don’t care for. They see a turn of phrase that strikes them as weak in some way, or lacks some sort of crispness or brightness that they cannot pin down, and they call it `passive’ without further thought. And such is the state of knowledge about grammar among the reading public that they get away with it.
Well sure, but the point is it would be a surprise: e.g. your understanding up till now of the boundaries of the term pie did not include this dish, probably fairly reasonably. And if this was a one-off experience, you might not redraw those boundaries very firmly.
I think responsibility for the mismatch between what you expect and what you get is more variable, depending on how far from common boundaries the new dish is. If you’re the only one, or one of a handful who is surprised, then yes, it’s probably on you. If practically everyone who orders that dish is surprised, and it turns out on inquiry that the only people who ever refer to that dish as a pie are the restaurant staff and their immediate family then responsibility for the steady stream of people doing a double-take at their dish lies more with the people who wrote the menu.
Those are the two extremes, I wouldn’t like to make any claim at the precise point on the intervening scale where it tilts one way or another but there is a point where having an idiosyncratic term for something becomes your problem, not everyone else’s.
Well, that’s a little unfair. Alice Faye lived a rather scandal-free life.
But for my contribution:
People argue over what constitutes barbecue, and in these parts, show a pic of a chicken and rice dish, and everybody has an opinion on what it should be called, how it should be prepared, and how it should be spelled.
I think it happens a lot - or sometimes definitions just shift - like with the older meanings of all those words like awful, terrible, etc.
I do appreciate the broadening of the view here, but the stuff I’m talking about is not really in dispute by anyone who is confused about a fuzzy boundary; it’s just people being dicks about a rule they like to pretend they are in a position of authority to enforce.
Ah well, in that case I’m afraid the best answer is going to be some combination of the aforementioned:
Intellectual battle royale
Gifted child syndrome
Actually being a child
Poor social skills
Plus bluntly, being an unpleasant little bully constantly on the lookout for something to belittle others for and thus prop up fragile sense of esteem.
I think some of it depends on context - if I say something like “I never bake pies” , I’m referring to a particular type of pie. The kind that is meant as a dessert and has at least one, possible two , pastry crusts with a filling. I don’t mean that I don’t bake crumbles or cobblers or that I don’t make cheescakes or ice box cake. And if my mother asks me to bake a pie for Thanksgiving , and i tell her I don’t do pies and she says “ But you made an apple crisp last year” , I will tell her that isn’t a pie. The “but” is important - she’s not just using a definition of “pie” that is different from mine. She’s arguing with me saying I do make pies because I made an apple crisp last year. But I can almost guarantee that she sees it as a made up rule I’m trying to enforce.
On the other hand, if I say I want to get a pie for dessert, I’m most likely going to be fine with anything that’s not a cake.
Whenever I see someone gatekeeping definitions, it tells me they have nothing valuable to add to the actual conversation at hand.
If you’re gearing up for an intense conversation or debate where precision is important, then so be it, but even then “what do you mean when you say X?” is more important to the conversation than “what is the culturally agreed upon meaning of X?” A good example of strict definition pedantry is when the word “theory” is used. If the conversation is informal then the colloquial use of theory as “just a guess” is fine. If it’s a discussion about evolution or origins of the universe or anything like that, then it is important to clarify the proper scientific use of theory versus hypothesis. For pies, tarts, or pizzas it doesn’t really matter because they’re all just tacos anyway.
There are times when the culturally agreed meaning is very important, sometimes as important as precision. A lot of times it seems analogous to the motte and bailey fallacy to say “Let’s say for the sake of argumentation that A is B. Now, let me demonstrate something about B. Thus, we’ve proven this thing about A.”
If you do not grant them their definition in the first place, it will not allow them to imply that they’ve proven something insightful by using language tricks.
For instance, any of the various proofs of “God”'s existence whereby “God” does not have any of the concrete properties the vast majority of religions assign to their deities. If you allow that it is a “Proof of God”, then a lot of people will take it to mean that the Abrahamic God, for instance, has been proven.
While I get that pedantically and annoyingly insisting on strict definitions is wrong, I feel myself mystified by people who don’t care about definitions, do they don’t care about being wrong? I don’t like being wrong, If i say something that is wrong and I’m corrected I’m usually thankful for it.
Also a need for strict definitions is sort of a side effect of my profession, programmers need strict definitions to work and that bleeds over to everyday life, this is great in a professional setting or when talking with other programmers but can be extremely annoying to normal people.
An example I like to use is my father, a programmer, telling me (another programmer) where a thing he needed was so I could retrieve it for him.
It was sorta like:
“Go to my room, in the nightstand to the left of the bed (as observed from the room’s door) open the third drawer from top to bottom, inside there’s a red box with blue, green and gray pills, bring me one of the gray pills from the bag that’s already open”
“Cattle” used to mean not only domestic bovines, but any domestic animal. “Corn” used to mean any grain.
— I sometimes ask for definitions when people are arguing about something and it seems to me that a significant part of the problem is that they don’t mean the same thing by a word they’re using. I have however discovered over the years that many people who are having vehement arguments about XY don’t want to stop in order to figure out that one of them is using the word to mean X and the other is using it to mean Y; even if — or maybe because — recognizing that would make the whole argument go away.
In some of the constructions you quoted, what’s being pointed out is that while bad things are acknowledged to have happened, responsibility has been evaded by the phrasing. “Bombs land” by itself reads as if this just happens like rain falling. “Country X (or Persons X) dropped bombs” makes it clear that particular humans made a decision to do so. It isn’t passive voice in the grammatical sense to say “bombs fell” or “girls died”; but depending on the rest of the context it may indeed be “passive” in the sense of implying ‘this just happened, nobody’s going to be held responsible for causing it.’
My wife does this, but English is her third language, so it doesn’t bother me at all.
Yes, and Pullum acknowledges this:
people have suggested to me several times that the sheer number of failures to apply the term `passive’ the way grammarians do indicates there must be something wrong with my assumptions: perhaps I am being too prescriptive, and in reality there is a vernacular sense of the term that simply isn’t the technical term in use among grammarians.
…
And there is a rather vague discourse-semantic property that one might say is shared by all the quotations I have given so far: in the examples cited, the critics seem to think that in some sense agency has been being obscured or attenuated, or some admission of responsibility has been evaded.
But he goes on to lay out more examples where “passive” doesn’t appear to mean anything except maybe “vaguely weak-sounding in some hard-to-define way”:
(40) From the BBC News Style Guide:
Compare these examples. The first is in the passive, the second active:
There were riots in several towns in Northern England last night, in which police clashed with stone-throwing youths.
Youths throwing stones clashed with police during riots in several towns in Northern England last night.
But the former is not a passive, and no clear agency or responsibility issue arises (in both versions the youths threw the stones, and in neither version is the instigator of the riots named or implied).
(43) From the style guide of a large corporation (which the informant preferred not to name: see this Language Log post):
Use active voice rather than passive voice.
Active voice is easier to read.
Instead of `we have decided,’
write `we decided.’
Instead of `we will be implementing a program,’
write `we are implementing.’But neither have decided nor will be implementing is a passive. The writer here seems to have confused the notion `passive’ with the property of containing an auxiliary verb.
Full article: