Forked Thread: Taking a Break

[Raven Crowking]

Yes, that is true. However, their are words that have such an accepted definition that the meaning is considered objective. If I use the word hair, people are going to know what I mean. There is no reason to get a consensus on the meaning. If I use the word Intelligence you have to get either a "this is what I mean" or a "For this discussion, this is what we are meaning"

RK

Sure. It is easier to get a concensus when a word is defined by something you can point to. It is less easy to get a concensus when a word is defined by something you can do. I.e., we are less likely to differ on corner cases of "table" than "running". Even so, nouns and verbs offer fairly clear (although subjective) consensuses.

Descriptive terms (adjectives, adverbs), though, offer no clear consensus. Be the word "great", "simple", "quickly", "fun", "videogame-y" or whatever, descriptive terms are so far on the subjective scale that to claim one should not use a descriptive term because it is vague is nonsensical.

Moreover, some terms, while someimes considered nouns, are used as descriptive terms. For some people, for example, D&D isn't something you can point to so much as it is a descriptive term for a type of rpg. What type differs by the person speaking.

(The same, of course, can be true for anything that one might think is "an objective object one can point to". Hence the aforementioned vagueness about the term "Coke".)


RC