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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5106097" data-attributes="member: 4937">Depends on what you want to be precise about.  English a terrible language for being precise about moral values and emotions.  However, as the foremost borrower language on the planet with the most loan words and the most synonyms for everything, it's one of the most descriptive languages available.  There are 20 or 30 subtle variations and shades of meaning for almost every word imaginable, and unlike say French, you can freely borrow words into it if you need a subtle variation not provided and proclaim that this borrowed word now describes that subtle variation.  The real difficulty with English is that most people aren't fluent enough in it (because most people only use 2000 or so words, and real English fluency takes about ten times that amount) to master all the subtle variations in thought provided by it, so they tend to use words as very loose synonyms when in fact they don't mean the same thing.  Lazily spoken English is understandable, but it isn't as clear as it could be.People keep making this complaint, but as of yet, no one has actually suggested the more specific word.I gathered that.  Or rather, I gathered that you only knew one definition, but I didn't know which one.  I didn't know if you knew the phrases real meaning, or if you only new the phrase to mean what it meant to those that had misunderstood and misused it.Right.  That's why I lumped it with the phrase, 'The exception proves the rule'.   Most people who use the phrase 'the exception proves the rule' use it in a nonsensical way that completely obscures its the originally understood meaning.  'The exception proves the rule' is shorthand for a complex and valid thought.  Because that thought is complex, it's not understood clearly by everyone who hears the phrase used, so they misuse it.  This results in most people's understanding of the phrase being entirely the wrong one - one that doesn't make sense if you think about it.If you think about 'too big to fail' literally, you see that the words don't contain the idea 'too big [to be allowed] to fail'.  The literal meaning of the words 'too big to fail' is 'too big to fail'.  The meaning you are familiar with has been attached to them for various complex reasons.  But, because you understood the new meaning from context, you never paused to consider why that meaning would be attached to words that didn't actually clearly state the new meaning.  That's partly because 'too big to fail' was a buzzword, a bit of shorthand.  Humans have a bad habit of when they hear something attaching their first instinctive understanding to it and then latching onto it and defending that instinctive understanding to the death if need be. Yes.  But the point is, I didn't know which definition you knew.  So if you said something was 'too big to fail', I wouldn't without context know what you meant.Maybe not, but that's not very flattering to your friends.Really?  Quite often words have five or six current meanings, and as someone who is very interested in artificial intelligence, its my opinion that probably they really have 20 or 30 and part of the problem of teaching language to a computer is we don't know how to define them and gloss over those various shades of meaning in a way that computers cannot.  One of my hopes for AI research is that as we really come to understand language, we'll begin to be able to employ it more intelligently than we do.False dilemma.  There are many more than two possible outcomes to that post (binary thinking again), the most obvious of which is that someone will say, "What a coincidence, I had that exact same experience and I know exactly what you mean!"   Part of the reason your analogy is such a bad one is that when the phrase 'videogamey' is exchanged, there is a comparitively high incidence of this third outcome (something I've already demonstrated when I showed that about 3/4 of the people who actually answered the question said basically the same thing).</blockquote>

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