Pedantry is like American football. You have to be smart enough to play, but stupid enough to think it worth playing.
Or, pedantry is like bling. To poor people, bling makes you look rich, but to rich people, bling makes you look poor. Even so, to stupid people, pedantry makes you look smart, and to smart people, pedantry makes you look stupid.
Rule of thumb: your grandma is always smart enough to know when you're being stupid.
Thinking a bit more about the times when I nitpick a technicality rather than digging into a real disagreement:
Both of your examples are cases where there's a LOT of subtext (friend implying status and/or attempting to influence my purchase decisions, grandma asserting authority and enforcing her preferences by implying universality), and much of the time I won't want to risk the relationships by directly contradicting or correcting them, _NOR_ by walking away and never seeing them again. And yet, it grates on me to take the option you didn't call out: just meekly accept the underlying disagreement. I totally get that the initial-response mechanism of pointing out that they've used a word in a way that doesn't exactly match a dictionary does not further a rational discussion, but I'm not sure a rational discussion is what these examples are.
Pedantry like this _is_ a way to assert a little bit of independence/disagreement (or, less justifiably, dominance), and to open the concept of disagreement in a way that's deniable, and start a subtle, unacknowledged negotiation which can be de-escalated easily if either party decides it's not worth pursuing.
Pedantry like this _is_ a way to assert a little bit of independence/disagreement (or, less justifiably, dominance), and to open the concept of disagreement in a way that's deniable, and start a subtle, unacknowledged negotiation which can be de-escalated easily if either party decides it's not worth pursuing.
Great point! That is, provided you make this a conscious choice. But if you are not making it consciously. If you are just following a habit of nitpicking (for whatever deeper psychological reasons) then de-escalation will be harder because you don't know where the conflict comes from.
The technology example reminded me of Darcey Riley's discussion of shattered dichotomies: sometimes people think of things as being either X or Y, and then learn an argument for why this dichotomy doesn't make sense. As a result, they might reject the dichotomy entirely, keep it but conclude that "everything is X" or "everything is Y", or acknowledge the argument but find the dichotomy useful regardless.
For instance, back in high school philosophy class, I used to argue that “all people are selfish”. If you’re hurt, and I go to help you, it’s not because I’m altruistic. It’s because the sight of you in pain causes me to feel pain, and I, selfishly, want to relieve my own pain (or I want to avoid the guilt I’d feel for not helping). Similarly, if I give you a gift, it’s not because I’m altruistic; it’s because I selfishly want the pleasure and satisfaction that comes from gift-giving.
In high school, I thought this was a great argument. As an adult, I roll my eyes. It’s not that the argument is wrong, per se; based on the definition of “selfish”, it really is possible to classify all actions as selfish. I just don’t think it’s useful. Our folk concepts...
the thing you know perfectly well people mean when they say "chemicals"
I honestly don't understand what that thing is, actually.
To use an example from a Facebook post I saw this week:
Is P-Menthane-3,8-diol (PMD) a chemical? What about oil from the lemon eucalyptus tree? Oil of Lemon Eucalyptus is typically refined until it's 70% PMD instead of 2%; does that turn it into a chemical? What if we were to refine it all the way to 100%? What if, now that we've got 100% PMD, we just start using PMD synthesized at a chemical plant instead?
I do like the idea from another comment here that
the motte is "technically, everything is a chemical," and the bailey is "No need to worry about the content of the food you buy."
But even that can be inverted. People buy "no nitrites added" bacon to try to avoid a dangerous chemical, and they end up getting the result of (all natural! organic!) celery-juice and celery-powder processes. At best, the nitrates in the celery still end up getting converted to nitrites during curing, except that now there's another loose variable in the production so a balance between "cardiac/cancer risk fr...
I honestly don't understand what that thing is, actually.
This was also my first response when reading the article, but on second glance I don't think that is entirely fair. The argument I want to convey with "Everything is chemicals!" is something along the lines of "The concept that you use the word chemicals for is ill-defined and possibly incoherent and I suspect that the negative connotations you associate with it are largely undeserved.", but that is not what I'm actually communicating.
Suppose I successfully convince people that everything is, in fact, chemicals, people start using the word chemicals in a strictly technical sense and use the word blorps for what is currently the common sense definition of chemicals. In this situation "Everything is chemicals!" stops being a valid counterargument, but blorps is still just as ill-defined and incoherent a concept as it was before. People correctly addressed the concern I raised, but not the concern I had, which suggest that I did not properly communicate my concern in the first place.
Perceived chemical-ness is a very rough heuristic for the degree of optimization a food has undergone for being sold in a modern economy (see http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/ for why this might be something you want to avoid). Very, very rough--you could no doubt list examples of 'non-chemicals' that are more optimized than 'chemicals' all day, as well as optimizations that are almost certainly not harmful. And yet I'd wager the correlation is there.
What if the thing you're trying to say is "I think the categorization scheme implied by your use of <word> is wrong, and will cause you to make wrong predictions?" This was the first thing that came to mind when I read your example about "chemicals" -- I objected to my dad's use of "chemicals" a few years ago, and it led to us discussing how that term conflates "has a scary-sounding name" with "has any evidence of being harmful at all". My dad previously thought that willowbark extract might be healthier/less harmful than aspirin, despite them both having the same active ingredient (salicylic acid).
I agree that people don't always want to debate about whether they're making a category error; if someone says they want to avoid food with chemicals and I object to their categorization scheme and they say "I'm not interested in debating that, please respect my food preferences so we can finish this shopping trip", then I should definitely drop the issue. But are your preferences that I shouldn't even bring it up?
(I might be typical minding somewhat here; I've gotten a lot of mileage from various rationalist friends asking me to taboo certain words in discussion, which forces me to think more carefully and often causes me to notice distinctions that I was eliding. So I like the tool of striking words from my vocabulary!)
Re-reading your post, it looks like you're mostly objecting to people feigning ignorance when a word they don't like comes up, which I agree is an annoying thing to do. I'm curious about whether you also object to people saying things like:
I think those examples are fine in many possible contexts. You can make a blog post with either instance as content just fine. My objection would come up if someone said "incel" and you said it was a horrible word instead of responding to their statement about incels - make that suggestion at another time. You could, if genuinely puzzled, ask if they mean incels as in lonely or incels as in violent misogynists, but I think context will tend to make that clear. And where it doesn't they don't in fact mean one of those things - they mean the conflation, and the word communicated that!
What is the rubric that marks the difference between a good semantic argument/point/question, and a bad semantic argument/point/question.
I would say there must be some rubric that marks the difference between "seeking clarity and understanding" and "seeking ambiguity and confusion".
Sometimes it is the person saying "I would like to mention this other definition of the word" who is seeking clarity.
Sometimes it is the person saying "Oh, come on, you know what I mean." who is seeking clarity.
And sometimes it's not necessarily about facts... It's about who get's to decide what is proper, and what is not. In each of the examples, "chemicals in food", "technology at the dinner table." one can legitimately ask--what concerns you about the chemicals in the food? What concerns you about the technology at the dinner table?
For the chemicals in the food example, what is probably a concern that they must rely on their own knowledge to decide whether each of the ingredients in the package is safe, and a lack of trust in the systems government and business have worked out to assure that foods are safe. That's a...
This post is an eloquent defense of the skillful wielding of the power of language against the forces of blandness, pedantry, and cowardice that every day threaten to degrade our cognition and thereby consume us all.
When it comes to the issue of "chemicals" in food, it's a well-defined term in the EU. It also makes a lot of sense to legislate different substances differently.
It would be madness to say that everyone who sells an apple has to list the thousand of different proteins that are in the apple on the ingredients list in a way that it isn't to tell food produces to list added substances that normally aren't found in apples.
On the same token, there's an argument to be made for the EU policy of saying that when somebody decides to a...
Somewhat of the topic of accurate labels: This reminds me of Scott A's old posts on the Non-central Example Fallacy and Motte-and-Bailey: A statement starting with " Technically, ..." is designed to pick out a non-central example, like that from the post, the motte of, say, "Technically, MLK was a criminal," to justify the bailey of, say, "Shoplifing is no big deal, even though it is against the law." Or, in your example, the motte is "technically, everything is a chemical," and the bailey is "No need to w...
I agree with this argument in general but not for slurs. I think it's appropriate to exert social pressure to prevent those.
I’d submit this post for curation if that feature was working, but since it’s not, I’m saying it in a comment. This is excellent.
Considering the fact that 80% of people think that food containing DNA should be labeled maybe pedantry in cases similar to the first one is actually the correct response (depending on who you talk to of course).
Basic politeness rules, explained well for people who don't find them obvious, yay!
I don't know perfectly well what someone means when they say the dip is full of chemicals. I know roughly what they mean, but I can't figure out exactly what they mean, or even know if they have a consistent or thought out definition at all.
When telling them that the dip contains dihydrogen monoxide, I am not being pedantic; I am saying "the plain meaning of what you are saying doesn't make sense. And any not-plain meanings are beyond my ability to guess, so could you please tell me what you're really trying to say?"
You can solve this by adding scare quotes or the phrase "so to speak". E.g., "That brand of dip is full of 'chemicals', so to speak." That way, you're safe from pedants without intruding on the existing meaning of the word "chemicals".
I have to say that I'm guilty of such pedantry (playfully, in my mind. perhaps not to the recipient, and I'll examine more closely next time it comes up), especially to break the ice when I don't think the reasonable but non-compliant response will be well-received.
I do think that language and communication _is_ personal and idiosyncratic, and a demand that I provide a single word for a concept that can be used in other contexts is somewhere between onerous and just unlikely. Clarification using many words is often perfectly reasonable. ...
This post helped me understand why something was bothering me, then provided additional insight. Thank you!
I feel like this post is missing an important piece.
When people say "chemicals" or "technology" they are very often not talking about the term in question, but communicating an emotional fact about themselves. "I am disgusted by foods that feel artificially produced", "I want you not to be distracted by devices during dinner". Coming up with better and more precise terms won't help at all, since the thing is being communicated has little to do with the referent of the imprecise term.
You can notice this when the ...
This is now my go-to post to point to when people are rules lawyering words. Really useful resource.
I definitely agree with the general principle of this post and the "technology" example made the principle clear and useful to me, but something feels off about applying this principle to the "chemicals" example. I think it's because most of the time, when someone says that something has "chemicals", what they mean is that it contains ingredients that aren't "natural", which is a term I've always found very confusing. There are plenty of technically false dichotomies that are nevertheless useful approx...
I want to point out that there are lots of situations where English speakers fluently use words that don't have clear dividing lines between their applicability and their inapplicability - it depends on context and details. "The music is loud." What if I'm deaf or far away or like to be able to feel the bass line in my bones? That doesn't make the sentence impermissible or even hard to understand and I don't need the speaker to produce a decibel value. "If you go to high altitudes, the air is thinner and you might get dizzy." How high? If I'm dizzy in Denver and the speaker thinks you shouldn't need to adjust your behavior until there are Sherpas about and meanwhile Batman can breathe in space, that doesn't make the sentence false, let alone useless. "It's cold, bring a jacket." Oh you sweet summer child, I'm good in short sleeves, thanks, I just don't know what you meant by "cold" -
There are lots of conversational purposes for which you don't in fact have to know where someone draws the line. You don't even need to be able to agree on every point's ordering in the spec...
Unfortunately, this is incredibly hard to do. It's much easier to notice patterns than identify the relevant property.
Noticing patterns is all that there is to do. There is no magic word that means exactly what you want to say. But some patterns are better at identifying the relevant properties than others. And I believe that pushing people to use more accurate words has some value.
Nearly all ecosystems have been heavily modified by human presence since 10 thousand years ago.
Yes, they have. And those modifications could be said to be unnatural. E.g. t...
I don't think the long term problems caused by natural ingredients are that well known. Nutrition is hard.
I'm all for less pedantry, but
there doesn't seem to actually exist a word in English for the thing you know perfectly well people mean when they say "chemicals".
Maybe that's because "chemicals" isn't a natural category? I don't really know what is meant by that word. It could be something about the manufacturing process. But possibly it just means "complicated words listed on the packaging" and nothing more.
I am not saying: you, yes you, have to talk to people who use words you can't stand or in...
One polite way to respond to people using words you prefer they not use is "[Word] upsets me for [Reason], can you use [Replacement Word] instead?" If they can't (because they're not a native English speaker, or they have a linguistic disability, or they are chronically sleep deprived, to name just three of the reasons that word replacement can be impossible), then you have to judge how important not being around people who use Word is for you.
You could also consider asking what they mean if you don't know what they mean. My rough sense is something like "a cluster of chemicals the central examples of which require industrial manufacturing processes to create, did not exist before the 20th century, are not part of any culture's traditional way of doing things, could not be manufactured in a home kitchen, and bear little resemblance to petroleum, corn, or soybeans in spite of being derived from them."
Extensionally, "chemicals" is food coloring that doesn't come straight out of a whole food, disodium edta, ammonia, peroxide, acetone, sulfur dioxide, aspartame, sodium aluminosilicate, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, sodium sorbate, methylchloroisothiazolinone....
And not: apple juice, water, table salt, vodka, flour, sugar, milk...
A thing doesn't have to be a natural category for people to want to talk about it and have a legitimate interest in talking about it.
I disagree with your second point and think you're missing mine. If you don't want to talk to someone, don't talk to them. You don't have to be cruel, and your desire to be cruel doesn't make it reasonable.
I guess this post is a bit of a typical mind-fallacy check for me, on the "not everyone has read In Defense of Food (or something similar)" front.
Defense of Food has a bit of the naturalistic fallacy going on, but I think it's core point is at least a hypothesis worth talking about and being able to make distinctions around.
Somewhere in the 20th century, people started getting a cluster of "Western diseases" (i.e obesity, heart disease) that seem to have something to do with diet (although non-diet lifestyle changes are another contender).
In general, the 20th century saw lots of industrialization that radically changed both diet and lifestyle. But in the diet front, there's a specific with worth noting:
Prior to mid-20th century, we did not have very fine control over what sorts of chemicals went into food. Food was made of chunks of organic matter with a lot of complex reactions going on. Mid-20th century, we started being able to break that down into parts and optimize it.
And this meant that suddenly, food became goodhartable in a way that it hadn't before. Industry could optimize it for tastiness/addictiveness, with a lot of incentives to do th...
I wish to clarify that I'm not asserting that everyone knows exactly what things are "chemicals" and what things are not. There's room for disagreement, for one thing, and the disagreements might turn on all kinds of little points about where a substance came from and even why it was added to the food. But I do think that given two lists of ingredients for different brands of, say, packaged guacamole, you could distinguish "few to no chemicals" from "lots of chemicals". That there isn't a strict, look-up-able boundary of necessary and sufficient conditions that fits in a "coherent model" doesn't mean it's not useful to gesture at for some purposes, sort of like music genres. I don't have a coherent model of music genres and I couldn't elaborate much on what I mean if I call a song "poppy" or "jazzy" but that doesn't mean it's not a statement I might reasonably utter.
"Thou shalt not strike terms from others' expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement." - me
Suppose your friend says: "I don't buy that brand of dip. It's full of chemicals."
Reasonable answer: "I'm skeptical that any of them are harmful in these quantities; we don't have much reason to believe that."
Reasonable answer: "Yellow 5? Are you allergic?"
Reasonable answer: "Okay, let's get the kind with four easily recognizable ingredients."
No: "Technically, everything is chemicals. Dihydrogen monoxide!"
Pedantry is seldom a way to make friends and influence people, but this example particularly gets my goat because there doesn't seem to actually exist a word in English for the thing you know perfectly well people mean when they say "chemicals". When I tried to find one on Twitter, the closest options were "toxins" and "additives". But neither is right. "Toxins" excludes yellow 5 - or, whether it does or not might be a point of contention; but it isn't the thing originally expressed with the word "chemicals". People may want to avoid - or otherwise discuss - "chemicals" for reasons other than thinking they're literally toxic; if I tell a maid I'm sensitive to chemical smells but vinegar is okay this is useful information. "Additives" includes, say, added sugar, which, while a plausible complaint, is a separate complaint.
Suppose your grandma says, "Okay, no technology at the dinner table."
Reasonable answer: "I'll put the laptop away to make room for the potatoes, but I need the phone because I get anxious without it."
Reasonable answer: "Sure, Grandma."
Reasonable answer: "We can try that until Uncle Bill starts making easily falsified claims about Flat Earth."
No: "Technically, the dinner table is a technology. And so are your glasses, Grandma."
In this case a more precise word exists - "electronics" ambiguously includes the chandelier but at least firmly sets aside the question of whether your grandma wants you to eat naked and with your bare hands. But refusing to know what she meant because she could have gotten closer to saying it, not even literally (she isn't being metaphorical), but technically, pedantically, definitionally? This is both a bad social move and a bad epistemic one; you're having the conversation on a level that is wholly about verbal wallpaper. Do you prefer to say "electronics" or dip into synechdoche with "screens" or spend nine syllables on "internet enabled devices"? Are you actually unsure if your grandmother wants you to set aside your smart watch, dumb phone, or electric blanket of intermediate intellect? Use your own words, ask your own questions, but don't enforce an inadequate prescriptivism with feigned incomprehension while your interlocutor only wants you to pass the peas.
Thou shalt not strike terms from others' expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement. It's a pet issue of mine; it's my pinned tweet. "Suitable replacement" means suitable across the board, Pareto improvement as seen by the user along every axis a word can have. I think people are within their rights to reject a proposed replacement for not meaning the right thing, sounding ugly, being one syllable longer, being hard to spell, not rhyming in a poem they're trying to write, and vague gut feeling that you're just trying to control them. I extend this as far as "gypsy" and "Eskimo", at least (and with slightly less fervor to a slur beyond that if you really don't have another term for Brazil nuts).
Suitable replacement is a very high standard. It has to be. If you take someone's words away - and refusing to understand them when the problem is not in fact in your understanding does that, since words are tools to communicate - they are very direly crippled. Many people think communicatively; while you might not be their only outlet for working through their ideas, social shame for imprecise language can do your work for you across the board if you hit someone vulnerable hard enough. If you offer them worse words instead of expecting them to guess, they might only be crippled to the degree of wearing uncomfortable shoes, but that's still too much. Don't set up shop a block farther away than you had to and dress code folks for wearing Crocs. Communication is already difficult.
Some things I am not saying:
Nah. Block people on every website you use over ship names and disown your sister for saying "moist" for all I care. You also have my blanket permission to use any sarcastic defense mechanism that works for you against your abusive parents if you have those, or whatever.
By all means offer. "I think the preferred term is 'transgender' this week." But if they can't abide the difference in shade of meaning or mouthfeel, maybe even if they overtly announce it's just because they want to call it like they see it and they see it in some horrid way, don't try to correct them by pretending to be missing that section of your dictionary when you really aren't.
No. My examples have in common that they point at things and you can tell what things they are by being a speaker of the language in the conversational context. If someone starts calling cardboard boxes "pants" for no reason they're just wrong and you don't have to learn their stupid code.
Edit 12/2019:
sirjackholland wrote a comment, now slightly buried, including this paragraph:
To which I replied:
In the linguistic sense, a term's use can be "felicitous", without it having to be precise, literally accurate, etc. If you don't know what a word means but you know what spectrum it's on... that suggests that actually you know what the word means.