C3PX said:Vaderisnothayden said:It gets soooo frustrating when somebody point blank refuses to understand something that's been explained to them.
No kidding!
For anybody else following this discussion who is still uncertain as to whether they are allowed to interpret words for themselves or not, let me set the record strait from an academic perspective.
word noun (which means it is a person, a place, or a thing. In this case, it is a thing)
"a meaningful sound or combination of sounds that is a unit of language or its representation in a text"
Once words are open for personal interpretation, they cease to be meaningful units of language, and become rather useless.
Of course, another school of thought (seemingly) would say that the definition of "word" that I posted above is pointless, as that it is merely one interpretation of what a word is.
It's possible that people here don't mean anything as drastic as what you think they mean when they talk of interpreting words. As you saw above, what I meant by interpreting the word reminiscent did not in fact count by your definition as interpreting it -you counted it as merely an issue of degree of reminisence. So people here championing the interpretation of words may not be disagreeing wth you as much as you think.
Example re what I said above:
C3PX said:
"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.
But I would still maintain that language and its uses are not as simple and clear cut as you seem to be saying. I have come across too many instances of subtlety and complexity and interpretation to believe that. But it's worth stressing that even there I may not be disagreeing with you as much as it may look like. I think it's possible that the area where I'm seeing complexity is not precisely the same area in which you're seeing things as clear cut. After all, no matter how much people hold to the meaning of words, there is incredible capacity for misunderstanding between human beings, particularly on the internet.