Scott Van Den Elzen wrote on Wed, 09 January 2008 21:06 |
Matthew Whitman wrote on Wed, 09 January 2008 10:44 |
Quote: | Words mean whatever the people who say them and the people who hear them think they mean. Your "distinguished instructor" doesn't get to decide what "PA" or "SR" or "Sound System" mean to everyone who says these things or hears these things.
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This reply makes absolutely no sense. Perhaps you might change your mind when your doctor asks for a tongue depressor and the nurse hands him an anal probe. "Oh, sorry doctor, but to me tongue depressor means anal probe." "No problem, I actually needed a stethoscope, but I refer to it as a tongue depressor."
That's called reductio ad absurdum, by the way. I learned it from my high school debate teacher. Would you like to discredit her, too, while you're at it?
-Matt
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One of the reasons communication is a lot of work is that the same words mean different things to different people. We all have different context that causes us to interpret language differently.
My point is that sticking to a rigid definition for a term like "PA" is likely to make things more difficult for yourself. Meanwhile, those who don't take such things too seriously can live in blissful ignorance.
When describing your "PA/Sound System," is it better to be "right" or understood? If it's up to me, I choose to be understood.
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Yes, language is constantly evolving new meanings for old words, but without some degree of stability the effectiveness of communication suffers. If language changes too fast then you have a situation in which people only a few years apart can't understand each other. There has to be some resistance to definition drift. In recent decades drift has accelerated to the point that I can barely understand someone a decade younger. Written language has suffered horribly as a result of computers and the internet. I'm not saying those are bad things, I can hardly live without them, but they have had some bad results. It's been over twelve hundred years that things like capitals, punctuation and spaces between words have been serving us well and I don't see any advantage to throwing that all away.
Language is based on rules. This allows a speaker to have a reasonable expectation that his listener will consistently interpret the message. If the rules are not at least somewhat rigid then they are not rules and communication will suffer. There's a big difference between periodically revising the rules to reflect dominant modes of usage and simply making them up
ad hoc.
The United States
comprises fifty states, it is not
comprised of them. A
bus is a shared mode of transportation or a shared electrical connection.
Buss is a company that makes fuses.
You're is the contraction for
you are and
your is the possessive of
you but ur is not a word unless it's capitalized in which case it's the name of an ancient city.
Alot is not a word.
Allot means to distribute in an organized fashion.
A lot is some bulk quantity of things. Setup is not a verb, it's a noun or adjective.
Everyday is an adjective meaning common or casual, not to be confused with the phrase "every day". Think of the song lyrics, "I am everyday people" and "Every day I write the book."
In my opinion it the people who initiate and propagate needless changes in language who are to blame for miscommunication, not those who insist on following the rules.