this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"

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[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 67 points 3 weeks ago (11 children)

Psycholinguisitics understands this effect. The "wrong" word is increasing cognitive load and slowing down the listener's comprehension. The exact same thing happens when pronoun use is unclear and a person has to parse the most likely referent from context.

Language, especially English, is not computer code but leveraging the existing "libraries" of meaning and declaring variables carefully is usually very useful.

[–] Benjaben@lemmy.world 7 points 3 weeks ago (10 children)

I wish we had a dialect or subset of English that was intended to be more like computer code, and would be used for precisely specifying things. I have no idea how we'd do such a thing, and it'd never be adopted (and probably it's been tried!). But trying to write English in a way that can't be misinterpreted can be a real chore.

[–] hakase@lemm.ee 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Natural human languages always have ambiguity. There are plenty of conlangs (constructed languages) specifically designed to avoid ambiguity though if you wanted to use one of those.

If such a version of English were ever made, it would immediately gain ambiguity as soon as people began speaking it fluently (and same for the conlang if a community of speakers began using it fluently as well).

[–] Benjaben@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah that's fair, and it was clear to me from the jump that it's an unrealistic desire.

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