DSimon comments on Rationality Quotes March 2012 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Thomas 03 March 2012 08:04AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (525)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Grognor 03 March 2012 08:57:49AM 37 points [-]

“Stupider” for a time might not have been a real word, but it certainly points where it’s supposed to. The other day my sister used the word “deoffensify”. It’s not a real word, but that didn’t make it any less effective. Communication doesn’t care about the “realness” of language, nor does it often care about the exact dictionary definitions. Words change through every possible variable, even time. One of the great challenges of communication has always been making sure words mean the same thing to you and your audience.

-Michael "Kayin" O'Reilly

Comment author: DSimon 04 March 2012 05:55:45AM 2 points [-]

One of my favorite things about many constructed languages is that they get rid of this distinction entirely. You don't have to worry about whether or not "Xify" is a so-called real word for any given value X, you only have to check if it X's type fits the pattern. This happens merely because it's a lot easier, when you're working from scratch anyways, to design the language that way than to have to come up with a big artificial list of -ify words.