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caeli  ·  3418 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Do some words bother you?

But efficiency!! "Totally" and "whatever" are highly frequent words that carry next to no information content and are great candidates for being shortened. Similar examples in other domains of language abound and are formalized in "uniform information density", the idea that there is an optimal level of information transfer rate. Spending too long on low-information content structures (including words) or too short on high-information content structures is a suboptimal communication strategy. For more you might be interested in Jaeger (2010).