po8crg comments on 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong - All

72 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 March 2008 05:09AM

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

Comments (70)

Sort By: Old

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

Comment author: po8crg 24 March 2012 06:57:08PM 0 points [-]

And, indeed, we have words or phrases for particular female physical traits that men find attractive. Look how many words there are for different shades of yellow or light brown hair, compared to just "brunette" for darker brown / black.

[Blonde, and the many pat phrases like platinum blonde, golden blonde, dirty blonde, etc]

Why? Because men find blondes more attractive on average.

Similarly, there's a set of looks that are not particularly well-correlated or particularly common but is known as "English Rose" because men find it attractive.

Sure, there's not a particular need for a word that is "woman that Ben Jones fancies", but there's plenty of value in "woman that has a particular look that lots of men like"