Luis VillaApr 15, 2024
The seemingly-harmless cultural quirk of math-speak described here by @glyph is, among many other bad side effects, the way the most outrageous excesses of e/acc snuck into (took over?) the basically correct impulse that lots of American philanthropy is self-serving pablum.
https://mastodon.social/@glyph/112248641440566368
Show threadAmgine

@luis_in_brief @glyph

Oh my, #Wiktionarian bait!

Using words with mutually understood senses/definitions to successfully communicate is a neutral positive: it has no value judgment.

Assigning a value judgment to the choice of words/phrases used to successfully communicate is no longer about communication.

E.g. "Throw the cows over the fence some hay, ja?" Normal English in the Scandinavian-influenced region I grew up in, but also a mean-spirited discrimination joke in the city school.

Apr 15, 2024 at 4:35amWeb
Show threadGlyphApr 15, 2024
@amgine @luis_in_brief Not sure what you're saying here. I am not trying to be maximally "about communication". I'm assigning a value judgement to a variety of inappropriate metaphors, because I believe that these metaphors influence the communicants' cognition in harmful ways, to wit, they provide an unjustified sense of certainty and formality where none should exist. It's a subtle form of misrepresentation. I am being "about culture" here, though, not "about communication".
Show threadGlyphApr 15, 2024
@amgine @luis_in_brief The denotations of all these words out of context is incorrect regardless, they're being used metaphorically. The metaphors may be mutually intelligible, but they're also misleading :)
Show threadLuis VillaApr 15, 2024
@glyph @amgine the metaphors shape the thinking, and in particular abuse and overuse of the metaphors starts as quick, efficient shorthand, but over time becomes a substitute for more precise thinking.
Show threadAmgineApr 15, 2024

@luis_in_brief @glyph

Or gains different senses/definitions.

Example: skew.

While in geometry it currently means neither parallel nor perpendicular, and in particular two lines which do not lie in the same plane and do not share any point, that is a precise jargonal use completely unrelated to it's earlier use as "to run at an angle; to escape".

skew - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

Wiktionary
Show threadFarce MajeureApr 15, 2024
@luis_in_brief @glyph @amgine ... I had to check and see if this was a thread about the vanishing utility of "enshitification" as a term, and somehow it isn't.
Show threadAmgineApr 15, 2024

@glyph @luis_in_brief

I was, in part, being self-demeaning. Wiktionarians tend toward descriptivism rather than pre- or pro-scriptivism.

A word is a word; it probably means different things in different contexts, or may have shades of meaning, and these are freighted values enhancing or detracting from the communication.

e.g. black (in English only)

User:Amgine: Difference between revisions - Wikidata

Show threadGlyphApr 15, 2024
@amgine @luis_in_brief Ah. I also lean heavily towards descriptivism in most cases. And in cases like this where I do indulge in a bit of prescriptivism, it's not because it's abstractly incorrect qua incorrectness, the "wrong way" to communicate, but due to specific influences that a particular style of communication might have. Cultural prescriptivism, not linguistic. Which is just, like… having values 🙂