I don't want to go about debating linguistics, but in reality language is usually pretty clean cut
I don't agree.
Octorox said:
There can be different interpretations of language. Different words have different connotations to different people.
C3PX said:Again, not if language is to mean anything.
Language means something, when we decide not to follow its rules we only make ourselves out to be idiots, and destroy our ability to communicate in the process.
Again, I don't believe it's as simple and rigid as you believe.
But it's obvious we're not going to agree on this so I think it's best we just agree to disagree.
"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.
The qualifiers were missing because I would have thought they were unnecessary. When someone says the show is reminiscent of the OT I naturally assume that because they made a general statement what they mean is it is overall reminiscent in some significant way of the overall OT, not that some detail reminds them of some detail in the OT. And I assume they mean meaningfully reminiscent because why would they waste time bringing up an unmeaningful level of similarity? Pointing to a star destroyer interior and saying "Look, this is reminiscent of the OT!" seems so pointless to me. Of course a star destroyer interior will be a bit reminiscent of star destroyer interiors in the OT -it's obvious and doesn't need to be pointed out. But that similarity also has no bearing on the overall mentality of the show which determines what the show feels like. It doesn't make the overall flavor of the show reminiscent of the OT. The nature of the show is very different from the OT and next to that star destroyer interiors are small pointless details. Maybe when DarkFather brought up his star destroyer interior I should have gone "What the fuck? What are you bringing that up for? What's the relevance?" Because that's certainly what I felt. There's so much more to a show or film than the interiors of starships and if you're going to talk about the OT and a show being meaningfully similar you've got to have stuff that's much more all-encompassing than that. And what's the point in making a fuss about similarities between the show and the OT if you're not discussing a meaningful level of similarity?
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.
Well, at the root of it we weren't just talking about whether the show reminded us of the OT, we were talking about whether they were similar. Or at least that's what I was talking about. Level of reminiscence was being taken as evidence of similarity.