Should language mean stuff?

ADMIN EDIT: this thread started in The Shoutbox as a discussion about Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" and whether or not it described things that were, in fact, ironic. It morphed into a discussion about language in general, and this post represents the best cutoff point available for when the discussion took this turn. Enjoy.

... this is a larger issue. It relates to how much words connect with reality. When words are sustained for their own sake, they loose the dialectical touch with the reality which causes their necessity. Words mean how we use them because we need them to mean those things.

There's no right answer to this. Obviously a word can be misused so often that it reaches a tipping point where it's more confusing to use it correctly than incorrectly. That can't be helped, and sticklers like myself can and should just deal with that (in most scenarios, at least...not all). But up until that point, we should all be insisting that words be used correctly to begin with.

You still haven't convinced me the song uses the word incorrectly. You still assume there is such a thing as a correct or incorrect usage of a word. You still assume that language is something that even comes close to being precise and not ALWAYS arguable.

It ain't math.

You say this like it's not built into the very nature of my statement. Of course you have to assume that there's such a thing as correct usage in order to say someone is using a word incorrectly. And you kind of have to assume it to contradict me, because you can't even say someone is using a word "correctly" if ALL word usage is deemed equally valid no matter what.

Why would you say "equally valid" as opposed to "equally expressive"? The concept of validity is precisely what I'm arguing against. It is not new. I first used it in here to address Ann Coulter. Things she says might be invalid on the assumption of some politically correct baseline. But the expressiveness of her words reveal truth. What should be looked at in a word is the SINCERITY of the word and therefore its connection to reality: not its complicity in some arbitrary and ever-changing set of rules.

The song was expressing something to us which we all understood, regardless of whether or not is was DEFINABLE by some set of rules.

I think we've been over this. I'll just run through some statements and you can tell me which you disagree with.

1. It is good and important that we communicate with each other.
2. Communication is greatly improved by using objective definitions of words.
3. When people use words differently, it breeds miscommunication and confusion.

These are the only things you need to accept to also accept that correcting people's word usage is sensible. And I, being the stickler, have to in turn accept that at a certain point a mistake in word usage can become so widespread that you have to accept it because using the word in its original sense is now more confusing than in the new one.

Your main error: the objective definition of a word is the way it is being used by a person.

"I am typing this shout on my mongoose."

I am speaking about this thing in front of me. This thing in front of me is the definition of that word. All other definitions only go around it by referencing countless other definitions. And these could all be wrong. There is one thing that isn't wrong, and that is that there is something in front of me that I am typing on. I call it a mongoose.

No, that's subjective. Something is objective if it is unbiased, fact-based, not subject to personal feelings, et cetera. "Objective definitions of words," then, merely means an agreed upon standard.

So, to recap: communication is good. Communication is dramatically more effective when we have agreed upon definitions of words. Ergo, enforcing these standards (however casually) is sensible because it helps maintain clearer lines of communication.

If your theory of what constitutes objective or material reality is just what people agree on...

Languages don't even work that way in the first place. Languages aren't "agreed upon". They certainly aren't standard. They aren't now and have never been and will never be. Languages are memetic. One person invents a word which then catches on as it is parroted over and over throughout the population. It is a collective flow of material, not a consensus. In the same way, capitalism is a collective flow while its behavioral flux is not a consensus.

Internet memes are themselves such a language, albeit an extremely open, heterogeneous, pictorial one. As we all know, one cannot force a meme. One does not propose a meme. A committee does not get together and decide what a meme is. It develops naturally by an unplanned proliferation of self-replication, i.e. people parroting each other.

Take the infamous "FFFUUUUUUU" meme and its grammatical structure of a four panel comic culminating on an exasperated expression and the first half of the expletive F-word. This structure is standard only in its potential to be altered. It has been modified again and again in order to express many different kinds of anger and sometimes even happiness or simple satisfaction. Indeed, the structure has been modified to the point of contradicting its original intent, but all this was only out of the sake expressing more. Sure, in the beginning, modifiers of the meme were called out for doinitwrong,jpg, but over time the alternatives proved to be just as useful as the original until the meme was not one but several, the general shape of the angry head itself going to become a staple of the emotive human in countless disparate comics and recombinations with other memes. And none of this was ever planned out or agreed upon.

I wonder what your whole agenda with arguing for the standardization of language is. It seems to be a rather liberal stance. Why not just let language roam free? Or is this a sign that you might finally get what I mean when I say that flows like capital and language are schizophrenic while government can GUARANTEE standards such as health care, living wage, etc.

Must have something to do with Austruck.

I can't help but notice that you're not answering my question. I laid out a few claims about language and what makes it useful and twice asked you to pick out which you thought was wrong. Can I take your refusal to do so to mean that you don't think any of them are wrong?

There's no contradiction here. The fact that language is memetic and malleable does not mean it is not also formed by consensus. The fact that nobody votes on what a word means doesn't mean that, in total, we don't have a rough agreement about what they mean. "Agreed upon" does not apply a centralized body or a governing council, it just means that, through the memetic process you've described (and other more formal ones later in a language's development), we form a consensus about what most words mean over time.

Even if you disagree in theory (and I don't see how anyone could, honestly), the result is undeniable. The fact that we understand each other at all when discussing advanced subjects is only possible because we're using words to mean roughly the same thing. It's also embedded in all your disagreements. Notice that when you wanted to achieve a contrast between a thing and its word (computer for mongoose), you were able to do so only because you knew what each word would summon in my mind. You didn't pick something similar to a computer, you picked something completely different to emphasize the contrast betweeen the two that would not be possible if did not know with a great certainity what each word would make me think of.

There is also, of course, the fact that you do not call your computer a mongoose. You call it a computer, because when you call it that, everyone knows what you're talking about.

The debate about usefulness is the same as the debate about language's connection with reality.

Or at least it should be. Religion is a prime example of a language that has been so divorced from reality that it becomes useful to speak of fictions. A new reality -- the reality of the language itself -- is made just as pertinent as material reality.

When a word refers to something that is fictional, i.e. any word, and is sustained through repetition, it immediately looses contact with reality by creating a general category. This is Plato's great mistake. Words do not describe the general. Words create the general by generalizing. However, we may take heed in that -- at least in early times -- words came about out of sheer necessity and utility, i.e. in order to speak of some thing. When society begins to loose contact with this dialectic between the necessity rendered by the real and the sounds we make coming out of our mouths -- reifying those sounds, those mere signs -- into something with intrinsic substance, this is when language fails to be what it is and therefore fails to be useful.

Except it isn't. You're reading this right now and you know what I mean because language is still very useful.

Language is useful insofar as it helps communicate an idea from one person to another more effectively. It's still very good at that, and it only stays good at it if we agree (informally, for the most part) that this word refers to this, and that word refers to that. This is trickier with ideas than it is with objects, but it still works very well. As far as I can see there's no actual dispute on this point, yes?

Also, I think the distinction between words that describe fictional things and words that describe real things is overblown. Fictional or not, they all describe ideas.

You don't understand what memetics is then. A meme is like a gene. It flows through space and time. It is always doing so. To equate the meme to a consensus is to render it unintelligible. It is like describing the state of the universe as a consensus among its particles. The purpose of a meme is to directly contradict the notion of a consensus, to cast information itself into the realm of material flow. Similarly, the gene -- upon which, of course, the meme it is based -- does not produce a consensus among species. It is precisely the failure of standardization that causes a misconception of what species are. The Bible describes all the animals of the Earth boarding Noah's ark as if they were set in stone. Now, I know you believe this, but I suppose I'm trying to show you why both are wrong. Animals, like language, are always changing. There was no standardizing force of God to lock them in place or to precisely define their forms. The reality of species is only a failure of our language and sensibility to capture the incredible and constant dynamism of all life. The same goes for language. A desire to standardize is a desire to immanently actualize Platonism into the form of a dictionary. This is fundamentally a move against reality; it is anti-realist and idealist, and therefore cannot ever be a form of pragmatism. The utility becomes subservient to a consistency with the standardization.

oh my god you guys are boring.

It sounds like you're assuming that because a word can change over time it therefore does not have a consensus definition at any one point, but that just doesn't follow. "Computer" may mean something different in twenty years, if we all start using it to refer to something different (which seems likely, by the way, as the word becomes hopelessly broad as we computerize more things). But that doesn't mean it doesn't have a meaning RIGHT NOW to a majority of people.

Again, I don't think this follows. Your example of memes is one person saying something, and another repeating it to mean the same thing. That's how consensus is formed: when enough people repeat the word and decide to use it to refer to a thing. The fact that this happens organically and can change later on does NOT NOT NOT contradict the idea that a consensus is formed for a time.

That... is why you fail.

If you don't get what I'm saying, you should ask for a clarification. Sheesh. You can't debate with someone if you can't see how the other person can be right.

You said roughly. And yet you're a "stickler". It is not a leap of logic then to suppose you would want to destroy the roughness of language, have everyone communicate perfectly (if possible). This is what a "stickler" is, no?

But you've already made the mistake here. Spoken language isn't rough and inconsistent because it fails to meet some standard of language. It is rough because the world is rough and inconsistent and language itself is a failed generalization of the real of this inconsistency.

To standardize language is to place it on a pedestal above reality, to keep is safe and insulated from the material winds of constant change that seek to modify its expressiveness. Loosing this contact is the death of language.

Try to remember that the way things happen to be at this moment is not the way they have always been.

This is part of what a meme is. A meme is a social formation, a code of acceptance into a community. But slang terms arise from local disturbances much like my joke about the mongoose. These slang terms are part of language; a language unto themselves. They too proliferate memetically and yes, they too carry something uniquely expressive about them. Hence their coming about in the first place.

People like you and Austruck seek to stifle this material creativity of language and to lock language into something eternal and sterile (which just happens to be the language that you both are most familiar with or just happen to be born into speaking).

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

actually, this kind of conversation could be interesting, but you guys get so long-winded and keep changing topics. it's too... much... info... in such a short amount of time!

Guys, STFU!