Unimportant 'Language Missuses' 2: Mother May II

[Grey_Wolf_c]

An abstract is a substitute for reading the work, in the same way as the blurb on the back of a book. It won't tell you all about the contents, but it should let you decide with confidence that you don't care enough to read the rest.

Not quite.

An abstract is supposed to remove the middle bits of the work - it tells you both the priors and the conclusion. If you are interested in either, then you can read the full work to judge if the data and methodology stand up to scrutiny.

A (well-written) TL;DR should do the same: jump from set-up to punchline/conclusion/resolution and, if your interest is piqued, you go back and read the whole story.

A blurb, on the other hand, is not supposed to give away the ending. It is supposed to give you the set-up only. Take the best* blurb ever written:

Death is missing – presumed ... er ... gone. Which leads to the kind of chaos to always expect when an important public service is withdrawn.

Ghosts and poltergeists fill up the Discworld. Dead Rights activist Reg Shoe – "You Don't Have to Take This Lying Down" – suddenly has more work than he had ever dreamed of. And newly deceased wizard Windle Poons wakes up in his coffin to find that he has come back as a corpse. But it's up to Windle and the members of Ankh-Morpork's rather unfrightening group of undead to save the world for the living.

Meanwhile, on a little farm far, far away, a tall, dark stranger, by the name of Bill Door, is turning out to be really good with a scythe. There's a harvest to be got in. And a different battle to be fought.

Notice that all it does it tells you were the story start, not where it will end.

Grey Wolf

*obvious hyperbole is hopefully obvious

[Fyraltari]

By contrast the worst blurb ever written award goes to the French edition of the End of Eternity which somehow manages to give the wrong set-up and spoil one of the end twists.

[Vinyadan]

"drain dead".

[Fyraltari]

Oh, I really want to learn French! Mmmm, it is so romantic

This is so confusing for native French speakers. We think the Italians are the romantic ones.

[Peelee]

This is so confusing for native French speakers. We think the Italians are the romantic ones.

Ooooohhhhhhh, I get it!

[Vinyadan]

This is so confusing for native French speakers. We think the Italians are the romantic ones.

I imagine this dialogue

"You have such a romantic language."
"But yours is even more romantic!"
"Ha ha, no, no, really, yours is the most romantic."
"No, I think that one goes rightfully to you. After all, we already have our spot for producing the best wines in the world, and..."
"WHAT THE **** DID YOU JUST SAY, YOU ********?!"

[Peelee]

I imagine this dialogue

"You have such a romantic language."
"But yours is even more romantic!"
"Ha ha, no, no, really, yours is the most romantic."
"No, I think that one goes rightfully to you. After all, we already have our spot for producing the best wines in the world, and..."
"WHAT THE **** DID YOU JUST SAY, YOU ********?!"

"You have Rome. Yours is more Romantic. QED."
"Mamma mia!"

[Willie the Duck]

I imagine this dialogue

"You have such a romantic language."
"But yours is even more romantic!"
"Ha ha, no, no, really, yours is the most romantic."
"No, I think that one goes rightfully to you. After all, we already have our spot for producing the best wines in the world, and..."
"WHAT THE **** DID YOU JUST SAY, YOU ********?!"

The fun part is you can have this go with either one starting.

[Fyraltari]

I imagine this dialogue

"You have such a romantic language."
"But yours is even more romantic!"
"Ha ha, no, no, really, yours is the most romantic."
"No, I think that one goes rightfully to you. After all, we already have our spot for producing the best wines in the world, and..."
"WHAT THE **** DID YOU JUST SAY, YOU ********?!"

Hey! Stop hacking my phone!

[Jon_Dahl]

Not for every coursework, no, but you made it sound a bit bigger than regular coursework. I certainly had to write abstracts for every major delivery - final year projects and the like. Heck, I remember I was asked to do the equivalent of an abstract for a coding project, once.

If you don't have one already written, then I'd be nice to hear the TL;DR instead. Depending on what your a prioris and conclusions are, it might pique my interest enough to want to read the whole thing.

Grey Wolf

It took me a while because I had to finish another essay and I had a six-hour D&D session to DM today.

Instead of writing an abstract, I decided to copy and paste the whole conclusion section. Why? I read that an abstract has 100 to 500 words. This paragraph from the conclusion section is only 130 words, so it should stand as an abstract under any definition.

Spoiler: Abstract

Show

In terms of multilingualism, metapragmatics and linguistic purity, we can see four phenomena on Giant in the Playground and Futisforum2.org discussion forums. First, cyber bullying is a convenient and straightforward way to force one’s views on linguistic purity on others and this phenomenon is compounded on Futisforum2.org forum by giving a platform and an established method how to shame forum members who code-switch between Finnish and English. Second, one-off instances of marked code-switching annoys Finnish speakers while non-standard English annoys English speakers. This shows that there are clearly different standards of linguistic purity in these linguistic communities. Third, it is relevant where loanwords come from. This is important eo ipso. Fourth, multilingualism prevails: negative reactions against multilingualism and linguistic variation inspire some people to use non-standard English and code-switching.

[Bohandas]

This one's not a misuse per se, it's actually something that was formerly correct. It still bugs me though....

What's up with the way the letter "s" sometimes appropriated other letters' characters in the older forms of English and German?

Ie. there was big s ("S") and little s ("s") like we have now, but there was also long s ("f") and, in german, eszett/double s ("B"). Even assuming they did need additional forms of the letter "s", why did they use characters that were already used by other letters in the same alphabet

EDIT:
And yes, I know the characters are distinct in serif fonts, but those are only a thing in calligraphy and type. They're going to look the same handwritten.

[Fyraltari]

I was taught to write estzetts with a vertical "tail", and since no word starts with a estzett it is completely impossible to mistake it with a capital b.

[factotum]

The long "s" doesn't usually have the crossbar that lowercase "f" does, so it's still a distinct letter even when handwritten. The German double-S actually looks more like a Greek letter beta than a capital B in my experience. In any case, it's not like they chose those letters to match others, it's that those letters evolved in parallel and just happen to look similar.

[Bohandas]

The long s has half a crossbar on the left side which doesn't cross over into the right side of the letter. Unless you don;t write it carefully, in which case it probably will

[Vinyadan]

This one's not a misuse per se, it's actually something that was formerly correct. It still bugs me though....

What's up with the way the letter "s" sometimes appropriated other letters' characters in the older forms of English and German?

Ie. there was big s ("S") and little s ("s") like we have now, but there was also long s ("f") and, in german, eszett/double s ("B"). Even assuming they did need additional forms of the letter "s", why did they use characters that were already used by other letters in the same alphabet

EDIT:
And yes, I know the characters are distinct in serif fonts, but those are only a thing in calligraphy and type. They're going to look the same handwritten.

You should look into ancient Greek. Uppercase sigma Σ, C, lowercase σ, ς, c.

[Gnoman]

The long s has half a crossbar on the left side which doesn't cross over into the right side of the letter. Unless you don;t write it carefully, in which case it probably will

THis appears only in later versions of the character, and isn't universal. The most common variant has no nub.

[Xuc Xac]

What's up with the way the letter "s" sometimes appropriated other letters' characters in the older forms of English and German?

Ie. there was big s ("S") and little s ("s") like we have now, but there was also long s ("f") and, in german, eszett/double s ("B"). Even assuming they did need additional forms of the letter "s", why did they use characters that were already used by other letters in the same alphabet

And what's the deal with B and R? Why did they just stick some extra bits on P instead of making new letters?

The truth is that there were a lot of different forms for each letter. The long s was just one of the last to fall out of use. Lowercase "a" used to look like "cc"! At least the long s served a useful function in saving paper. Space - saving glyphs like long s or writing "nn" as "ñ" were the medieval equivalent of data compression to save bandwidth.

The eszett ß is a ligature of a long s and a short s. It was used so much that it just became its own letter. Just like the "et" ligature became & or the long i became j.

[Jon_Dahl]

Here is a list of my favorite languages misuses.

English: "Was it mean?" (meaning: What does it mean?).

Finnish: "Salamia" ("salamis" in the partitive case) as opposed to "salamoita" ("rays of lightning" in the partitive case).

Finnish: "Haltian luvalla" ("with the elf's permission") as opposed to "haltijan luvalla" ("with the owner's permission"). Official sources state that haltia and haltija are both 'owner', but this decision has nothing to do with how people actually use and understand Finnish.

Portuguese: "Louca" (a crazy woman) as opposed to "louça" (dishes). Sometimes adding a ç is a pain in the butt, so in some cases a normal c is used instead. This can cause (amusing) miscommunication. I laughed with tears in my eyes when a native speaker of Portuguese asked me in WhatsApp if I leave crazy women around my bed.

[veti]

. I laughed with tears in my eyes when a native speaker of Portuguese asked me in WhatsApp if I leave crazy women around my bed.

Kinda makes more sense than leaving dishes around your bed. Or is that just me?

[Jon_Dahl]

Kinda makes more sense than leaving dishes around your bed. Or is that just me?

Context: We were talking about my unconventional and disorganized urban bachelor lifestyle. I hope it makes more sense now.

[Wardog]

A recent coinage that bugs me, because it doesn't mean quite what I would assume it means:

"Plant-based diet".

Based on normal English use, I would assume that means a diet in which plants are the main components. However, it has recently started appeared as a synonymn/euphemism for "vegan diet" (i.e. only plants and nothing else).

IMO, the "based" is unneccessary and confusing. What they are actually talking about is simply a "plant diet".

[Willie the Duck]

IMO, the "based" is unneccessary and confusing. What they are actually talking about is simply a "plant diet".

On a technical level, for sure. On a cultural level, we tend to talk about "the noun diet" (the grapefruit diet, the quinoa diet, and so on) as 'a diet' one goes on for a time to lose weight. So 'plant diet' might communicate to many that it was similar to going vegan for a restricted period of time to achieve certain ends (weight loss, determining if you feel better after cutting out ____, etc.), as opposed to (at least attempting to) changing your ongoing food consumption pattern to exclude non-plant material.

[Aedilred]

Here is a list of my favorite languages misuses.

English: "Was it mean?" (meaning: What does it mean?).

I suspect, indeed, am all but certain, that they're not saying "was it mean" but "what's it mean?" thus contracting "does" to "'s".

Unless they're writing it down, in which case they're just wrong.

[lesser_minion]

A slightly weird one: "begging the question".

Using "begging the question" to refer to the logical fallacy relies on obscure meanings of the words. It's not really wrong because you can use the phrase this way and be understood -- but you're using the language in a way that abandons common sense for no benefit.

This one's particularly weird because I think I may be more likely to be more irritated when people get this more right.

[georgie_leech]

A slightly weird one: "begging the question".

Using "begging the question" to refer to the logical fallacy relies on obscure meanings of the words. It's not really wrong because you can use the phrase this way and be understood -- but you're using the language in a way that abandons common sense for no benefit.

This one's particularly weird because I think I may be more likely to be more irritated when people get this more right.

I dunno, both uses more or less work out to "sure, but that assumes that thing we're discussing is true."

[lesser_minion]

I dunno, both uses more or less work out to "sure, but that assumes that thing we're discussing is true."

I'm not really seeing that.

When you use it to mean the same thing as "prompts the question" or "raises the question", you're saying, "as a result of this X that we've just said, we now need to ask Y".

The logical fallacy meaning -- "your argument depends on your conclusion being true" -- comes from Latin, and people don't really use the word 'question' like that any more. Which begs the question: why can't we just come up with another term for the logical fallacy?

[Wardog]

A slightly weird one: "begging the question".

Agree. I think that's a particularly irritating example of a more general language misuse, namely "insisting that one specific technical meaning is the only valid meaning of a word of phrase".

[lesser_minion]

A recent coinage that bugs me, because it doesn't mean quite what I would assume it means:

"Plant-based diet".

Based on normal English use, I would assume that means a diet in which plants are the main components. However, it has recently started appeared as a synonymn/euphemism for "vegan diet" (i.e. only plants and nothing else).

IMO, the "based" is unneccessary and confusing. What they are actually talking about is simply a "plant diet".

I presume it's "plant-based" rather than "plant" because you're eating plant products, not just plants.

Also, a vegan diet and a plant-based diet aren't quite the same thing. IIRC, veganism is defined as avoiding animal cruelty/exploitation wherever it's practical to do so, which means that what's vegan depends on the situation and varies from person to person, whereas a given food is either plant-based or it isn't.

There are also cases such as honey (clearly plant-based, probably not vegan) and the meat animal from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (potentially vegan, definitely not plant-based).

Of course, I'm not vegan, so I could be wrong about all of that.

[Lissou]

Honey is indeed not vegan. However I believe mushrooms are, and they're not plants, they're fungi. But I don't know if they're part of a "plant-based diet", they could very well be.

[Bohandas]

A slightly weird one: "begging the question".

Using "begging the question" to refer to the logical fallacy relies on obscure meanings of the words. It's not really wrong because you can use the phrase this way and be understood -- but you're using the language in a way that abandons common sense for no benefit..

IIRC it's not even obscure senses, it's a straight-up mistranslation of the original latin phrase