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

  • anarcho_blinkenist [none/use name]
    ·
    1 month ago

    I want you to know that people who do this shit aren't being serious about semantics and word definitions and there is no convincing to be had. Someone who says those things 100% don't care about words at all and are 100% instead entirely acting in bad faith to use your good-faith discussion to devalue you and the seriousness the things you say, and by doing so insinuate further into the body of discussion the scum fascist implications underlying their undermining games. It's not about the 'literal definitions vs connotative and colloquial definitions' and intellect to them. It is about exactly the effects of their flippant bad-faith rhetorical games in exhausting and frustrating and toying with you to further the space they can take up from you and in the discourse and spread the visible reach of their rhetoric which conceals underneath the wretched perspectives which they deliberately avoid saying concretely.
    It is exactly the strategy and outlook described in Sartre's The Antisemite and the Jew

    The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc." Never believe that anti‐ Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

    It is one of the reasons why one does not 'debate' fascists. They are not serious or good-faith interlocutors on a fundamental base level, and actively exploit and abuse for their own ends that assumption of them.