One of my biggest pet peeves is semantic pedantry, especially if it hinges on invalidating colloquial usage of a term.

It’s one thing to correct somebody who mistakingly uses a similar-sounding but different-meaning word than what they intended. A good example of this is correcting someone who says “equivocal” when that person actually meant “equivalent.”

However, it’s another thing entirely to fail to understand that words are shaped by how society uses them, not merely a dictionary or an educational textbook. An example of this would be someone saying that it’s invalid for humans to identify as asexual as a sexual orientation because in biology, the term “asexual” describes organisms that can reproduce without sexual activity.

Being unable to differentiate between connotation and denotation isn’t the level of intellect people think it is. It’s actually the contrary, as it shows a lack of nuance and an effort to grasp at straws only done by small-minded people who think that solely adhering to literal definitions and rejecting common usage is somehow indicative of some heightened degree of intelligence.

I felt inspired to say this because someone on a YouTube video wrote a comment pertaining to Indigenous people, and a “scholar” responded, “What you’re saying makes no sense because everyone is Indigenous to somewhere on the planet.”

It’s the degree of smugness that is so damn disproportionate with how warranted the smugness actually is that gets me.

Also, this isn’t referring to instances where discussing the meaning of a word actually serves some purpose and isn’t just nitpicking. That’s a whole other subject.

nerd left-arrow Basically, fuck these people! right-arrow smuglord

  • RiotDoll [she/her, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    I’m on the spectrum, so I get liking lists of things and rigid categories and hierarchies of knowlege, but it drives me wild that there are these people, who speak and write a language, who are like, prideful even of having a narrow range of literacy, where definitions are affixed, spelling is as steady as nuclear decay, and convention, punctuation, and the wonders of the modern world simultaneously conspire to strip out most ambiguity in language, it doesn’t feel like an accomplishment to have a narrow view of what language is? It doesn’t feel like a good thing that anything more than simple metaphor, uncritical and literal examination of text, and obsession with form over intelligibility is beyond you because you’re really fucked up and gigglin because somebody threw down the wrong They back there, or used a word in an unsancitoned way.

    Like literally- lol- you have entire cohorts of people whose identity has some load bearing amount of “I’m better than you because I can invalidate your language on a range of meaningless technicalities.” in people for whom a metaphor of any complexity would be flayed open and fed through the sleucing machine of their mind if it ever fell upon their ears

    Like okay, train someone in archaic languages using a basic grammar book, and then have them try to read some medieval latin manuscript and see how smart they feel after 15 minutes