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comment by caeli
caeli  ·  3416 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).





ignorantcollective  ·  3416 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ah, you mean I should gear my preferences around the less than 1% of people I communicate with who mangle words for efficiency, forcing the inefficient process of deciphering the communication onto me, rather than around the more than 99% of people who will say things such as, "... So I was, like... totes whatevs, right... Cos... You know?"

Actually, in a more serious tone, I believe in the evolution of language, and I accept it will change in ways that don't match my preferences. We have such a rich and beautiful language, and I appreciate people who are articulate, and will naturally gravitate towards them in conversation. I don't expect anyone to feel any loss if I wander away from a conversation because the way the person who is speaking is making me want to beat them into a coma with a heavy thesaurus.

caeli  ·  3416 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah of course I don't fault you for your preferences!! Totes and whatevs annoy me too...but I just like linguistic explanations :p