C3PX said:Vaderisnothayden said:I was using reminiscent in the sense of "meaningfully reminiscent" or "the whole is reminiscent", as opposed to the sense of "some bit is reminiscent". It's a valid use of the word. There are different ways things can be reminiscent and all versions I have mentioned fit in with the dictionary definition. No matter how much you follow dictionary definition, interpretation is still important. The reality is that very many words are interpreted. That's how language works. It's not a simple clean cut thing. It's messy and complicated.
I don't want to go about debating linguistics, but in reality language is usually pretty clean cut (though obviously, there are exceptions, but most of these exceptions are nullified by context), it only becomes messy and complicated when people decide not to play by the rules.
You have idiot thinkers like Bill Clinton ("depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is", "depends on how you define 'alone'") who seems to think words are open to individual interpretation, but they really are not. "Is" in the English language always means "is", you cannot interpret it any other way.
If we really had to go around pondering how exactly we are to interpret the word "is" every time someone uses it in a sentence, then we'd still be walking around in animals skins, being awed at the existence of fire, and inventing wheels (in other words, we'd have a hard time progressing). But, amazingly, I can pick up a novel written by a man who died over a hundred years before I was born, and despite some linguistic evolution that may have taken place between his time and mine, I will be able to read it come out with the same story everyone else who has read that book has come out with. Sounds pretty clean cut to me.
"I was using reminiscent in the sense of "meaningfully reminiscent" or "the whole is reminiscent", as opposed to the sense of "some bit is reminiscent". It's a valid use of the word."
"Meaningfully reminiscent", "wholly reminiscent", "somewhat reminiscent" now we are adding qualifiers to these words to indicate the degree of reminiscence. Yes, they are all valid uses of the word, nobody would argue otherwise. However, these qualifiers seemed to be heavily lacking from the conversation that was going on not long ago. I suppose we can take this to mean that the meaning or interpretation of the word "reminiscent" was never an issue, but the degree of reminiscence was were the problem lie.
Either way, reminiscence is a rather relative thing (not in its definition or interpretation, but in the feelings of the person using the word). While I may say Battlestar Galactica is reminicent of Star Wars someone else may disagree and say, "You're completely looney! They are absolutely nothing alike!" Regardless of how this fellow feels on the matter, a fact remains: Battlestar Galactica reminds me of Star Wars. Therefore to me, BSG is reminiscent of SW, while to the other guys, BSG is not at all reminicent of SW. In other words, a rather fruitless debate.
There can be different interpretations of language. Different words have different connotations to different people.