(no subject)
Aug. 20th, 2019 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatBeen very tired lately, don't know why -- I've been sleeping. But I may want to get to bed prior to 10:30 tonight -- except I doubt I will sleep.
1. Been pondering semantics, mainly semantics got me into not one but three heated arguments last week - two of which were at work over the phone. One was about whether or not equipment delivered to a site is allowable, when they equipment is already on the site. The contractor took it to mean that we weren't paying for the operating cost of the equipment, when we meant was that we weren't paying for equipment to be transported to a site, when it's already there. It's been an on-going argument. And each time, it gives me a headache.
Also as an aside...there's two phrases that are weirdly controversial among grammarians and give me a headache as a result. (I don't remember rules, particularly math and grammar rules because they aren't logical to me. So I can't remember them. What I remember is how it sounds or feels. If it sounds or feels right -- that's what I go by. I think that way. If you don't think that way, there is no way you will EVER understand what I'm saying. It will sound insane to you. I know I've argued with people about this. Most recently my cousin. It's how I think. I've met a few other people who think like this -- so I am not alone.)
Anyhow -- the two phrases are:
Whether or not -- I had a friend in law school, in which that was her pet peeve. It should just be "Whether" because the "or not" was redundant. But for me the Whether lacks poetry and rhythmic balance. It just sounds jarring without the "or not". Apparently I'm not alone in this perspective, since a lot of people use "whether or not".
Could care less or couldn't care less -- Couldn't Care Less sounds better, but could care less makes more logical sense. I get confused and use them interchangabley. I've been corrected for using either, which makes the confusion worse.
I've found some interesting links discussing the semantics issue that I'd like to share.
* The Art of Arguing Semantics -- this is a blog post written a few years back.
A semantic argument begins when someone refuses to accept the way that another person defines, uses, or otherwise relates to a specific word or even symbol (like a flag). If you've ever found yourself in the middle of one, you probably realized at a certain point that the conversation felt like it was moving nowhere, or in circles. The advice “avoid talking about politics and religion” results from the tendency of political and religious discussions to turn friends into enemies over disagreements they weren't previously aware of, perhaps even to themselves. These disagreements typically have to do with the way that one interprets things: like baptism, or foreign aid.
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone had the same working definition for every word? Wouldn't progress happen so much more quickly? No. In a sense, if a language existed with perfect harmony between all of its semantic elements, progress would have already reached its completion. Dissonance between the what speakers experience and certain learned features of semantic elements is what causes them to change (and the arguments). For example, If you grow up learning that God says the Christians are going to Heaven, and then you meet a guy and he says, well, actually, the Muslims are going to Heaven, because your conception of God is wrong, it’s obsolete, let’s just you’re not likely to respond with an attitude of gratitude.
As painful as they can be, semantic arguments are necessary for language evolution. For example, someone might get the idea society as a whole is conflating two processes using one verb. This is common in scientific and religious practice; if a person is able to distinguish the properties of something that they consider to be distinct from whatever had been historically by denoted verb, they create a neologism, a new word, to signify that process.
The rest of the article gets oddly political and religious. But this bit reminded me of semantics debate I had over the meaning of a soul in a live journal post back in 2008 or thereabouts.
Perhaps the word that’s received the most semantic abuse is the word “god”, whether or not it’s capitalized. In ancient Hebrew, God was a verb, YHWH, meaning “I will be that which I will be,” because in the most ancient Hebrew everything was a verb (this is probably the case for all of the most primitive languages). Thus, one never asked questions like “Does God exist”? Because the verb for Will be is the same as the name for God so the question would be like asking “What will be will be?”As the feedback cycle between semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology progressed, God became nounified. At some point, the deities of the Greeks and the Hebrew God got conflated under the same name, so they had to be differentiated by capitalization. Later on, more people started using the same word to refer to the deity they worshipped.
So we are dealing with perhaps the most semantically ambiguous concept on the planet, other than perhaps “thing”. This is why I immediately abandon any discussion that starts off with “Do you believe in God?” if God is not immediately defined. Otherwise, what you end up with is a bunch of Atheists who hate Young Earth Creationism and focus on the God who smites 40 children with a bear for insulting a prophet, and a bunch of people who aren’t really even Theists just accusing the Atheists of only being in there arguing because they've got major resentment issues, and then you’ll have one guy who is either a young earth Creationist or a really good troll providing fuel for the flame.
Sort of what happened with the discussion of the soul. We were discussing the meaning of the word soul in Buffy the Vampire Slayer - and got derailed by people stating they didn't believe in it. (Which was sort of irrelevant to the discussion -- because honestly who cares if you believe in it or not, when you are discussing it in relationship to a television serial's text? But alas...that's where we went, until we all realized that we did not define it the same, so really didn't know if we believed in what someone else defined a soul to be or not. The argument went in a circle.
* Arguments matter even if they come down to semantics
I’m a philosopher, working in logic and related issues. This means that I spend a lot of my time working with words and arguments. And sometimes, when I’m not feeling so good about things, it can seem like it doesn’t matter, that it’s all just words. Arguments about theories in ethics, about issues in metaphysics or epistemology—on a bad day, at least—can seem to be nothing more than pointless hot air. Here’s an illustration of the point, due to the American Pragmatist philosopher William James.
Here’s the scene—a man walks rapidly around a tree, while a squirrel moves on the tree trunk. Both the man and the squirrel face the tree at all times, but the tree trunk stays between them.
Here’s the argument—a group of people are arguing over this question: Does the man go round the squirrel or not?
The moral of the story, for William James, is that there’s nothing substantial at issue in this argument. He says this:
Which party is right depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him… Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. — William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907
And clearly, he’s right. Nothing much hangs on how we use these words, and it’s up to us what we mean by “going round.” If we mean one thing, the man counts as going round the squirrel. If we mean another, he doesn’t. That’s all we need to know, and there’s nothing left to argue about. The issue has evaporated.
This move—where we end a debate by paying careful attention to what we mean when we use words—is a powerful tool in philosophy. You can shed a lot of light on an issue by stepping back and asking what we mean. When we argue about whether it’s good to always keep your promises, it helps to clarify different things we might mean by “good.” Different understandings of that word will lead to different answers of the original question, and clarifying the different things we can mean by a word goes a long way to help clear up confusion and shed light on disagreement.
There's a long middle part regarding disagreement on the meaning of the word "marriage".
I liked this end bit..
It’s in the presence of dialogue and disagreement that we can get our ideas out on the table and we can learn what we think, where we might be confused, how our ideas hang together, and how they might be clarified or improved.
2. Disney/Sony Dispute Ends Spiderman's involvement in the MCU
EXCLUSIVE: Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige won’t produce any further Spider-Man films because of an inability by Disney and Sony Pictures to reach new terms that would have given the former a co-financing stake going forward. A dispute that has taken place over the past few months at the top of Disney and Sony has essentially nixed Feige, and the future involvement of Marvel from the Spider-Man universe, sources said.
This comes at a moment when the last two films Kevin Feige produced broke all-time records — Disney’s Avengers: Endgame became the highest grossing film of all time, and Spider-Man: Far From Home this week surpassed the James Bond film Skyfall to become the all time highest grossing film for Sony Pictures.
That's sort of sad actually for Sony...but okay. I don't care one way or the other. Never been a huge Spiderman fan. My favorite superhero comic book characters have yet to shine on the big screen. Still waiting for a decent Cyclops, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, Storm, Rogue, Gambit, Kitty Pryde, Nightcrawler, Iceman, Angel, Beast, Dani Moonstar, and Magick flick. But I'm not holding my breath.
3. Making more headway in Guilty Pleasure Romance than I did in the Cooking Gene.
Although... Time Served has some issues. For one thing the writer clearly doesn't know what it is like to be a lawyer in the US and has gotten all her information from American Television. (US lawyers do not look like supermodels, if they did, they would be supermodels not lawyers, more money, less stress, better wardrobe.)
But, at least the characters have jobs. This is a plus. Usually they don't or they do, but we never see them working just having sex -- and we begin to wonder how they remain employed.
Another...there's a villain, a female shark attorney who has slept with all the partners. (Eh. No. There are firm HR policies against this sort of thing in law firms. Also usually the partners are married. So ewww. And that would hamper her credibility with clients and the firm. The real world really isn't sex-obsessed as our culture likes to make it out to be.)
The hero can bang the heroine fifteen times at night and then some. (What is he on, Viagra?)
I tend to handwave these things. Romance novels are fun because I know they aren't real and these relationships do not exist in our world.
The reviews are amusing though. Some people hate the heroine for dumping the hero and being unapologetic about it. Some people hate the hero for making a big deal out of her dumping him, she was 17, and wanted to get away from an alcoholic mother and a hellish living situation. It's not her fault he robbed a store and did hard time. That's on him, besides he'd have done it anyway. And she has no obligation to visit him in prison. No one does. But the hero does seem to get past it, and is weirdly sweet. The sex is hard and rough, but he gives her a safe word to tell him to stop, and never hurts her or forces himself on her without her consent. So the writer skirts around that problem rather neatly, while still keeping the sex scenes interesting. Always a challenge. Sex scenes tend to be rather passive -- unless there's some conflict involved (and in most cases that conflict is rape, and DO NOT WANT.)
1. Been pondering semantics, mainly semantics got me into not one but three heated arguments last week - two of which were at work over the phone. One was about whether or not equipment delivered to a site is allowable, when they equipment is already on the site. The contractor took it to mean that we weren't paying for the operating cost of the equipment, when we meant was that we weren't paying for equipment to be transported to a site, when it's already there. It's been an on-going argument. And each time, it gives me a headache.
Also as an aside...there's two phrases that are weirdly controversial among grammarians and give me a headache as a result. (I don't remember rules, particularly math and grammar rules because they aren't logical to me. So I can't remember them. What I remember is how it sounds or feels. If it sounds or feels right -- that's what I go by. I think that way. If you don't think that way, there is no way you will EVER understand what I'm saying. It will sound insane to you. I know I've argued with people about this. Most recently my cousin. It's how I think. I've met a few other people who think like this -- so I am not alone.)
Anyhow -- the two phrases are:
Whether or not -- I had a friend in law school, in which that was her pet peeve. It should just be "Whether" because the "or not" was redundant. But for me the Whether lacks poetry and rhythmic balance. It just sounds jarring without the "or not". Apparently I'm not alone in this perspective, since a lot of people use "whether or not".
Could care less or couldn't care less -- Couldn't Care Less sounds better, but could care less makes more logical sense. I get confused and use them interchangabley. I've been corrected for using either, which makes the confusion worse.
I've found some interesting links discussing the semantics issue that I'd like to share.
* The Art of Arguing Semantics -- this is a blog post written a few years back.
A semantic argument begins when someone refuses to accept the way that another person defines, uses, or otherwise relates to a specific word or even symbol (like a flag). If you've ever found yourself in the middle of one, you probably realized at a certain point that the conversation felt like it was moving nowhere, or in circles. The advice “avoid talking about politics and religion” results from the tendency of political and religious discussions to turn friends into enemies over disagreements they weren't previously aware of, perhaps even to themselves. These disagreements typically have to do with the way that one interprets things: like baptism, or foreign aid.
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone had the same working definition for every word? Wouldn't progress happen so much more quickly? No. In a sense, if a language existed with perfect harmony between all of its semantic elements, progress would have already reached its completion. Dissonance between the what speakers experience and certain learned features of semantic elements is what causes them to change (and the arguments). For example, If you grow up learning that God says the Christians are going to Heaven, and then you meet a guy and he says, well, actually, the Muslims are going to Heaven, because your conception of God is wrong, it’s obsolete, let’s just you’re not likely to respond with an attitude of gratitude.
As painful as they can be, semantic arguments are necessary for language evolution. For example, someone might get the idea society as a whole is conflating two processes using one verb. This is common in scientific and religious practice; if a person is able to distinguish the properties of something that they consider to be distinct from whatever had been historically by denoted verb, they create a neologism, a new word, to signify that process.
The rest of the article gets oddly political and religious. But this bit reminded me of semantics debate I had over the meaning of a soul in a live journal post back in 2008 or thereabouts.
Perhaps the word that’s received the most semantic abuse is the word “god”, whether or not it’s capitalized. In ancient Hebrew, God was a verb, YHWH, meaning “I will be that which I will be,” because in the most ancient Hebrew everything was a verb (this is probably the case for all of the most primitive languages). Thus, one never asked questions like “Does God exist”? Because the verb for Will be is the same as the name for God so the question would be like asking “What will be will be?”As the feedback cycle between semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology progressed, God became nounified. At some point, the deities of the Greeks and the Hebrew God got conflated under the same name, so they had to be differentiated by capitalization. Later on, more people started using the same word to refer to the deity they worshipped.
So we are dealing with perhaps the most semantically ambiguous concept on the planet, other than perhaps “thing”. This is why I immediately abandon any discussion that starts off with “Do you believe in God?” if God is not immediately defined. Otherwise, what you end up with is a bunch of Atheists who hate Young Earth Creationism and focus on the God who smites 40 children with a bear for insulting a prophet, and a bunch of people who aren’t really even Theists just accusing the Atheists of only being in there arguing because they've got major resentment issues, and then you’ll have one guy who is either a young earth Creationist or a really good troll providing fuel for the flame.
Sort of what happened with the discussion of the soul. We were discussing the meaning of the word soul in Buffy the Vampire Slayer - and got derailed by people stating they didn't believe in it. (Which was sort of irrelevant to the discussion -- because honestly who cares if you believe in it or not, when you are discussing it in relationship to a television serial's text? But alas...that's where we went, until we all realized that we did not define it the same, so really didn't know if we believed in what someone else defined a soul to be or not. The argument went in a circle.
* Arguments matter even if they come down to semantics
I’m a philosopher, working in logic and related issues. This means that I spend a lot of my time working with words and arguments. And sometimes, when I’m not feeling so good about things, it can seem like it doesn’t matter, that it’s all just words. Arguments about theories in ethics, about issues in metaphysics or epistemology—on a bad day, at least—can seem to be nothing more than pointless hot air. Here’s an illustration of the point, due to the American Pragmatist philosopher William James.
Here’s the scene—a man walks rapidly around a tree, while a squirrel moves on the tree trunk. Both the man and the squirrel face the tree at all times, but the tree trunk stays between them.
Here’s the argument—a group of people are arguing over this question: Does the man go round the squirrel or not?
The moral of the story, for William James, is that there’s nothing substantial at issue in this argument. He says this:
Which party is right depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him… Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. — William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907
And clearly, he’s right. Nothing much hangs on how we use these words, and it’s up to us what we mean by “going round.” If we mean one thing, the man counts as going round the squirrel. If we mean another, he doesn’t. That’s all we need to know, and there’s nothing left to argue about. The issue has evaporated.
This move—where we end a debate by paying careful attention to what we mean when we use words—is a powerful tool in philosophy. You can shed a lot of light on an issue by stepping back and asking what we mean. When we argue about whether it’s good to always keep your promises, it helps to clarify different things we might mean by “good.” Different understandings of that word will lead to different answers of the original question, and clarifying the different things we can mean by a word goes a long way to help clear up confusion and shed light on disagreement.
There's a long middle part regarding disagreement on the meaning of the word "marriage".
I liked this end bit..
It’s in the presence of dialogue and disagreement that we can get our ideas out on the table and we can learn what we think, where we might be confused, how our ideas hang together, and how they might be clarified or improved.
2. Disney/Sony Dispute Ends Spiderman's involvement in the MCU
EXCLUSIVE: Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige won’t produce any further Spider-Man films because of an inability by Disney and Sony Pictures to reach new terms that would have given the former a co-financing stake going forward. A dispute that has taken place over the past few months at the top of Disney and Sony has essentially nixed Feige, and the future involvement of Marvel from the Spider-Man universe, sources said.
This comes at a moment when the last two films Kevin Feige produced broke all-time records — Disney’s Avengers: Endgame became the highest grossing film of all time, and Spider-Man: Far From Home this week surpassed the James Bond film Skyfall to become the all time highest grossing film for Sony Pictures.
That's sort of sad actually for Sony...but okay. I don't care one way or the other. Never been a huge Spiderman fan. My favorite superhero comic book characters have yet to shine on the big screen. Still waiting for a decent Cyclops, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, Storm, Rogue, Gambit, Kitty Pryde, Nightcrawler, Iceman, Angel, Beast, Dani Moonstar, and Magick flick. But I'm not holding my breath.
3. Making more headway in Guilty Pleasure Romance than I did in the Cooking Gene.
Although... Time Served has some issues. For one thing the writer clearly doesn't know what it is like to be a lawyer in the US and has gotten all her information from American Television. (US lawyers do not look like supermodels, if they did, they would be supermodels not lawyers, more money, less stress, better wardrobe.)
But, at least the characters have jobs. This is a plus. Usually they don't or they do, but we never see them working just having sex -- and we begin to wonder how they remain employed.
Another...there's a villain, a female shark attorney who has slept with all the partners. (Eh. No. There are firm HR policies against this sort of thing in law firms. Also usually the partners are married. So ewww. And that would hamper her credibility with clients and the firm. The real world really isn't sex-obsessed as our culture likes to make it out to be.)
The hero can bang the heroine fifteen times at night and then some. (What is he on, Viagra?)
I tend to handwave these things. Romance novels are fun because I know they aren't real and these relationships do not exist in our world.
The reviews are amusing though. Some people hate the heroine for dumping the hero and being unapologetic about it. Some people hate the hero for making a big deal out of her dumping him, she was 17, and wanted to get away from an alcoholic mother and a hellish living situation. It's not her fault he robbed a store and did hard time. That's on him, besides he'd have done it anyway. And she has no obligation to visit him in prison. No one does. But the hero does seem to get past it, and is weirdly sweet. The sex is hard and rough, but he gives her a safe word to tell him to stop, and never hurts her or forces himself on her without her consent. So the writer skirts around that problem rather neatly, while still keeping the sex scenes interesting. Always a challenge. Sex scenes tend to be rather passive -- unless there's some conflict involved (and in most cases that conflict is rape, and DO NOT WANT.)
annoying linguist reply ;o)
Date: 2019-08-21 03:29 am (UTC)'Whether' can mean the same thing as if, but only in a different sort of construction. " I'd like to know whether you are going to school." I can see that a sentence is simpler sometimes without 'or not' as in "Whether you is go to school is your choice." Maybe that's what bothered your friend. But "Whether you go to school, I'm going to beat the tar out of you." doesn't quite make sense. So I'd rather agree with you instead of your friend.
'Couldn't care less' is the correct version. It equals "My level of caring is at its bottom. 'Could care less' is heard so often, but it really means "my level of caring is not at the bottom. I use the wrong one sometimes!
Re: annoying linguist reply ;o)
Date: 2019-08-21 12:50 pm (UTC)I looked up "couldn't care less and could care less" -- to understand it's orgins...
< AHREF="https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/could-care-less-versus-couldnt-care-less">Quick and Dirty Tips - Couldn't Care Less vs. Could Care Less
"People say they could care less when, logically, they mean they couldn’t care less.
The phrase "I couldn’t care less" originated in Britain and made its way to the United States in the 1950s. The phrase "I could care less" appeared in the US about a decade later.
In the early 1990s, the well-known Harvard professor and language writer Stephen Pinker argued that the way most people say could care less—the way they emphasize the words—implies they are being ironic or sarcastic.
Other linguists have argued that the type of sound at the end of "couldn’t" is naturally dropped by sloppy or slurring speakers.
Regardless of the reason people say they could care less, it is one of the more common language peeves because of its illogical nature. To say you could care less means you have a bit of caring left, which is not what the speakers seem to intend. The proper "couldn’t care less" is still the dominant form in print, but "could care less" has been steadily gaining ground since its appearance in the 1960s."
Re: annoying linguist reply ;o)
Date: 2019-08-28 08:31 am (UTC)Go me! :-)
(okay, so I was a teenager and not thinking specifically in the right language, but imagine me polishing my nails on my shirt right now all the same ;-) )
Love these kind of discussions; don't get involved too often, because of how often they devolve and make you even more depressed about humanity than when you started.
Thanks though; glad I got around to reading this.
Re: annoying linguist reply ;o)
Date: 2019-08-28 12:14 pm (UTC)You're welcome. And very true -- as recent experience has indicated.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-22 12:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-22 01:13 am (UTC)If it hadn't already been done that way six times...maybe.
That said, there were three people on scans daily who liked the idea. Co-worker didn't.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-22 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-22 12:38 pm (UTC)I'm guessing that you really did not like Tony Stark or Downy Jr? Which would explain why you didn't like the MCU, which was up until now, pretty much built around his character.
Far From Home -- doesn't really feature him, as far as I can tell, except in passing -- because Stark is dead. Going forward, Stark won't be in any of the MCU films -- so if that was a problem, it won't be now.
On Spider-Man? I've only seen two of the six films in the movie theater. The only film worth watching is Into the Spiderverse -- that's hands down the best superhero film that I saw, and one of the better animated ones. (I didn't see Into the Spiderverse in the movie theater -- saw it on demand.) Most of the films I've watched on television.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-22 11:56 pm (UTC)Agreed, Into the Spider-Verse was absolutely amazing. I need to rewatch soon, while it's still on Netflix.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-23 01:57 am (UTC)However...Stark is now out of the MCU -- they killed him at the end of Endgame. He's not coming back. Downy Jr is done. So you can safely watch any movie released from this point forward without Stark. (The only movies that focus on Stark that much are Iron 1-3, Avengers, Avengers Age of Ultron, Captain America Civil War, Spiderman Homecoming (and really only peripherally), Avengers Infinity War, and Avengers Endgame. Everything else is free of him. Granted that's a lot -- but considering there's 22 movies..nine is roughly a quarter of the total. That's actually why the films work -- you can watch most of them without seeing the others. You only really need to see the others to watch Captain America Civil War, Avengers Endgame and Avengers Infinity War. So, 3 out of 22 films isn't bad.
I'm surprised you made it through Iron Man 1 and 3, they are Stark centric.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-22 12:39 pm (UTC)Oh, and no, Into The Spiderverse doesn't feature anyone from the MCU. Not connected to it at all.