I love language (Off-Topic)

by iconicbanana, C2-H5-OH + NAD, Portland, OR, Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 02:26 (3486 days ago) @ naturl selexion
edited by iconicbanana, Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 02:49

False dichotomy. Words and meanings are socially negotiated. While there may indeed be expressive vs technical language, you cannot make the claim of being more precise.

I don't think I said I was more precise, but I guess that is what I meant. Nor did I say that there were only two ways to communicate. I said "more emotional" or "more technical" - lots of room between the extremes. Sure, I guess you could find the mid point then declare that there are only two sides. Like saying that some people are more short and some are more tall. We know that the world consists of more than just short or tall people.

As you noted there is "technical" language, where words have very defined meanings. Law, medicine and science are good examples. My initial response was regarding something technical in nature so to say "several" where only "two" was correct prompted me to make a clarification/correction. In this case I will claim to be more precise.

I think Robot was trying to suggest that precision can't necessarily be applicable where use dictates different definitions. In this particular case, you and I are coming from two different social groups where one uses several as 2 or more, and the other uses it as more than 2. It's impossible to be more precise here because the rules of the two particular segments aren't equivalent; you could be right in one and not the other, but that has nothing to do with precision between the two.

On the subject of precision in this matter of magnetic fields, I personally didn't find it necessarily better, as I was not looking at a precise amount. Wikipedia suggested 1/100 as the fraction, which to me didn't seem particularly precise: it seemed, in fact, that they were suggesting 2 orders of magnitude. In physics courses I took in college, we usually gave an error of one order of magnitude as acceptable for a correct answer with extremely large or small numbers, so I didn't want to say two, as the fraction given already seemed like an approximation; 'several,' which I typically use as something akin to "more than one and less than five," seemed like a good fit, since it offered room for the error that I wanted to imply with enormous numbers relating to planetary forces. Precision in this particular actually seemed less ideal, since exact numbers weren't provided.