I understand, but people also have very different standards of communication clarity. There are a lot of hidden assumptions, even when you’re trying to be 100% clear. Sometimes people can’t put their thoughts into words, or they don’t have the capacity for what you think is clarity. And in this case it’s just a very minor mistake. The person might not be native, or they may have been failed by their education system, or they might just be tired or stressed. There are lots of valid reasons why communication can degrade. I’m a bit autistic and struggle with ambiguous meaning or communication that doesn’t fit patterns I’m used to, sometimes to a truly irrational degree, and I’d like for others to speak my language more so I can understand them better, and I’d like to be able to speak their language more, to make them understand me better, but it’s just sort of the way of life. People are very fluid beings, not at all tied to rigid logic. People are also all very different, and their efforts all come in different forms. They emphasize different things, focus on different things, not just communication efficiency. What I’ve learned too with other autistic people is that everyone’s standards for communication clarity are different. I don’t think you can speak a universal language that everybody understands perfectly 100% of the time. What does happen is that people who talk to each other often learn each other’s language, able to talk more concisely and efficiently, but you can’t really expect that of strangers on the internet. Of course “birds of a feather flock together” as they say. People in the same internet communities might have the same interests, consume the same media, have the same discussions with the same people. But there’s no getting around communication degrading. In the worst case you just have to ask someone what they mean, maybe clearly explain your issue with the ambiguities, and wait for disambiguation. Learning to ask precise questions so as to elicit the best response from someone, to immediately get the answer you seek, is also a lifelong challenge. It’s not worth getting upset about a single instance of degraded communication, if you can even call it that. I’d be more upset with the universe for making us all so very different.
Corrections are how we reduce lingual entropy. Being corrected shouldn’t be embarrassing or shameful, we should welcome corrections so we can be better understood.
Language is collaborative, we’re always working to be better understood and to help each other be better understood.
If no one was ever corrected about anything, language will drift so badly we’d lose the ability to communicate. Try reading Olde English, before standardization people would just do whatever they wanted. It ranges from barely legible to gibberish.
I understand, but people also have very different standards of communication clarity. There are a lot of hidden assumptions, even when you’re trying to be 100% clear. Sometimes people can’t put their thoughts into words, or they don’t have the capacity for what you think is clarity. And in this case it’s just a very minor mistake. The person might not be native, or they may have been failed by their education system, or they might just be tired or stressed. There are lots of valid reasons why communication can degrade. I’m a bit autistic and struggle with ambiguous meaning or communication that doesn’t fit patterns I’m used to, sometimes to a truly irrational degree, and I’d like for others to speak my language more so I can understand them better, and I’d like to be able to speak their language more, to make them understand me better, but it’s just sort of the way of life. People are very fluid beings, not at all tied to rigid logic. People are also all very different, and their efforts all come in different forms. They emphasize different things, focus on different things, not just communication efficiency. What I’ve learned too with other autistic people is that everyone’s standards for communication clarity are different. I don’t think you can speak a universal language that everybody understands perfectly 100% of the time. What does happen is that people who talk to each other often learn each other’s language, able to talk more concisely and efficiently, but you can’t really expect that of strangers on the internet. Of course “birds of a feather flock together” as they say. People in the same internet communities might have the same interests, consume the same media, have the same discussions with the same people. But there’s no getting around communication degrading. In the worst case you just have to ask someone what they mean, maybe clearly explain your issue with the ambiguities, and wait for disambiguation. Learning to ask precise questions so as to elicit the best response from someone, to immediately get the answer you seek, is also a lifelong challenge. It’s not worth getting upset about a single instance of degraded communication, if you can even call it that. I’d be more upset with the universe for making us all so very different.
Corrections are how we reduce lingual entropy. Being corrected shouldn’t be embarrassing or shameful, we should welcome corrections so we can be better understood.
Language is collaborative, we’re always working to be better understood and to help each other be better understood.
If no one was ever corrected about anything, language will drift so badly we’d lose the ability to communicate. Try reading Olde English, before standardization people would just do whatever they wanted. It ranges from barely legible to gibberish.