People who define things strictly (in everyday settings) - what's your motivation?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Getting everyone on the same page helps avoid confusion. It’s valuable from a knowledge and a social perspective. It allows people to participate. In any case there’s a spectrum of understanding that is created by context. We can use localized (to the conversation) meanings to communicate effectively.

It can, however, become a problem if using the word in a localized way makes communication less clear.

@Thudlow_Boink mentioned a few examples that could be illustrative.

If someone says “I don’t like bugs”… it’s fair to assume that they are not talking about a subset of insects, but of all arthropods, or at least the non-aquatic ones. Context makes the meaning clear, and there’s no need to get nitpicky. There’s also no need to assume the speaker doesn’t know that there are more precise categorizations of creepy-crawlies. That kind of accuracy is just not relevant to the conversation.

What about “I don’t like juice”? A little trickier. Is Hawaiian Punch juice? Maybe? Is juice a beverage that tastes like fruit? That contains > 0% fruit in it? Can carbonated beverages be juices? Is it about the percentage of sugar?

These questions might or might not matter depending on the context in which we hear “I don’t like juice”. If I’m hosting a party and a guest tells me that in advance, no problem. We’ve got a number of beverages that clearly are nowhere the definition of ‘juice’, so I don’t actually need to know the specifics.

However, if a guest says “I’m vegetarian”, I might need to know whether their definition of vegetarian is ok with dairy or eggs. It doesn’t matter so much that they use some precise definition of vegetarian, as long as they can communicate what it means to them.

I’m a good enough host that I know to interrogate people’s dietary labels because it is often important or necessary for them, and I want to get it right. But there are those who don’t understand that there are words that change meaning depending on who is using them.

I know plenty of people who will serve chicken stock to vegetarians, not because they are sinister, but because they cannot understand that vegetarianism is not simply “I will not eat pieces of flesh.”

So much of our language is about abstraction, and whenever there’s abstraction, there is room for misunderstanding.

This was kind of rambling, but the tl;dr is that pedants who refuse to understand other people unless those others conform to a particular language choice are annoying. And, those who refuse to get specific or clarify their own meaning in the face of questioning can be equally annoying. Both types are aggressively fighting against clear communication in their own ways.

42

That’s why I said “depending on the context”. If he’d given only such examples, I wouldn’t have argued about it. But he gave instead a batch of examples with no context; and then shifted later to ones including context as if all such cases included the same type of context as he chose.

I’m not going to get into corporate-speak guides. If he wants to go after those specifically, more power to him.

— The full article is a long discussion of specifically grammatical uses of the term “passive” as it applies to the English language. I didn’t read all of it. I agree that people speaking purely in the context of grammar should be more precise; but I think most of the people he’s talking about aren’t speaking in the context of grammar.

Quoted for truth.

43

Precision is sometimes incredibly important; if you’re a heart surgeon, it matters a whole lot which tube you are doing something to, so it is incredibly important that you don’t say vena cava when you mean aorta.

In most other contexts, you can have precision if you want it. If I am in a pub and I fancy a pie, and it is very important to me that the pie should have a bottom crust, and the menu doesn’t specify, I can just ask when I order. If the waiter doesn’t know, the chef certainly will.

There may of course be occasions when it is impossible to know whether it is necessary to seek clarity - the pie example is not one of those cases - everyone who cares about pies having a bottom crust knows that some pies don’t have one; so if you care, you know you should ask, but it isn’t always like that and that’s unfortunately just a feature of the world.
I once ordered poutine in a burger bar and what turned up was fries and gravy, but the cheese was mild cheddar that had been soaked in milk to try to make it a bit more like fresh curds. There was no way to really know in advance and be alerted to the notion that I should ask ‘hey, are you going to use real fresh cheese curds or some sort of fake nonsense?’ - it wasn’t an expectation of variation, because poutine is (as far as I know) reasonably tightly defined, compared to ‘pie’.
In the case of undesired surprises like that, I suppose a discussion about definitions would be in order, or just send it back and say it’s unacceptable, or refuse to pay, or just grudgingly eat it and never go there again, or something.

44

Will you be unhappy when the waiter delivers a slice of Boston Cream Pie?

45

Yes, because that’s actually a cake. But I wasn’t talking about ordering from a waiter - nobody just orders “pie” from a waiter. I was talking about going to the bakery/supermarket to buy a pie - if they don’t have apple pie, I’ll most likely be fine with apple crisp/crumble/cobbler/turnovers.

46

If I was, I would be divorced by now. My wife grew up in the UK and Ireland. I don’t question clearly wrong terminology like shepherd’s pie or black pudding.

47

Honestly, what I’m taking away from this story is that it’s really, really important to rigorously defend the strict definition of poutine, or horrors will be unleashed in its name.

48

IME, using a poor definition of terms that can be interpreted more broadly is a much bigger problem than a tightly defined term being used for an edge case, like with a typical pumpkin pie. At least once a week I come across a patient who tells me something like “my heart is fine, my cardiologist said so”, even thought there’s documentation in the chart that the patient in question has coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure. I can only assume that by telling the patient in question (assuming that they actually did say something like that) “your heart is fine”, that the cardiologist meant that there is no acutely uncontrolled disease process, as opposed to completely normal. Yet I run into that misunderstanding on a weekly basis.

49

I think maybe so. It is (as far as I know) a singular dish rather than a whole diverse category of things. Stuff like that probably benefits from being properly defined.

50

I’ve had the same experience in Montreal of all places. Not extremely curd-ish cheese and what’s more, very dry gravy. And I had hoped to try poutine because I never had before (and probably still haven’t.) So I was disappointed. They didn’t taste bad bad but it might have been more truth in advertising to label them “cheese fries with gravy glaze”.

51

I’m rereading the title as: You people being dicks in this way, why you gotta be dicks in this way?

Is that more or less what you’re asking?

52

Kind of, but I might of course be wrong - maybe people mean it in a totally lighhearted way and it just doesn’t land, or maybe there’s some other explanation or motivation that I haven’t considered or imagined.

53

There’s sort of a cultural chasm in play too.
In my family, specially when when my father and I were talking, conversations often took the form of debates, with corrections, counter-examples, examination of hypotheticals, etc. Sometimes we even took contrary positions for the pure fun of debating them.
When I tried that with my wife we had some of our worst fights, in her family that kind of thing was completely alien and considered demeaning (specially because my family debating style did not refrain from implying (sometimes very forcefully) that the opposing opinion (but not the person) was extremely idiotic))
It took me some time to train myself out of it, and learn to interpret the signs my wife was sending that the conversation was not being fun for her and for me to get out of debate mode ASAP.

54

I ordered a chicken pot pie at a rather nice restaurant, It was a bowl of chicken stew, covered with a single top layer of (not very good, pre-cooked) “crust”. This -to me- is not a “pie” and I queried the water and he said “many complaints about that” and replaced it with no issues.

Yep, and worse when they insist on only ONE TRUE definition!!, when the word has several. Same for spelling- some words have two different spellings- get over it.

Which actor? :zany_face:

Yes, it slightly annoys me when “Literally” is used to mean figuratively- but only if way overused, like the Valley Girls supposedly did. It is fine if not overused.

55

It’s my understanding that sort of phenomenon is fairly common. Different families (and cultures) have different customs about proper conversation and argument, much of which isn’t formalized or even really conscious. So somebody can easily think they are being polite and reasonable, while the other person finds them obnoxious or even threatening; and if the latter doesn’t mention that the issue can really poison a relationship since the other person won’t know to stop.

56

It’s worse than that, the offended person can genuinely don’t understand that there is some kind of miscommunication in process and attribute the offending person attitude to pure malice.

57

IMO a lot of this is leftover lies to children. As has been said upthread, people love to categorize things. As we’re slowly teaching kids about the world, we introduce lots of ideas in a black and white fashion when the reality is various shades of gray.

Words ought to have exactly one meaning and everyone should know it and agree with it is an idea that gets drummed into a lot of kids. Not explicitly, but implicitly. Some grow out of that belief. Others never do. But the power of misplaced oughts is huge.

58

And it’s true for technical matters of course, but not for everyday matters and certainly not for artistic matters.

59

Weird thing (maybe a discussion for another thread) is people are frequently unaware of how they themselves are routinely using words that have multiple meanings, but seem acutely aware of when someone else does it in a way they don’t understand or don’t like.

60

Right. Most of us over the age of ~8 have internalized that reality isn’t that way. But many still struggle with accepting that the ought is wrong too, at least in most places.

As such those folks’ own internal dictionary has a lot of unrealistic bright lines and false distinctions that the rest of the populace doesn’t share. e.g. “Pie must have top crust; Tart mustn’t, and that’s the critical distinction of otherwise exactly synonymous terms.” Despite the fact all aspects of that thought are at least partly wrong to a decent fraction of all people.