I miss the old days when meaning of words was not something subjective and "debatable" and "relative", and you could just refer to a dictionary and go on with the rest of your day.
Would you elaborate on that, Ron?
What is it you find amiss here? Is it the fact two threads were stared specifically to discuss the meanings of two words? Is it the fact that some people seem to be attempting to bulldoze their own ill-considered linguistic straitjackets on to the world at large? Is it the fact that I am offering reasonable objections to this ill-conceived effort to straitjacket the actual meanings of actual real-life words (as opposed to some Platonic-ish ideal of what words *should* mean in some ideal world)? Or is it something else altogether, that has nothing to do with any of these three, that troubles you?
I ask because some of those who are attempting this straitjacketing project -- without much success, but they are attempting it nevertheless -- have been around here in these forums since far longer than I, and therefore I’m inferring that possibly, probably, you might, by referring to “old days” that were a happier time than our present days, be attempting to express support for their misguided efforts here.
Do correct me if I’m wrong in so inferring. If you can explain your position and your remark clearly, and can show me that I’m strawmanning you here, then I’ll be happy to retract the rest of my post (in as much, that is, as it wouldn't then apply to what you've posted here).
But if what I’m inferring is true, then I’ll ask you to consider the alternative that these people seem to be offering in place of this hairsplitting over linguistics. Their solution, as far as I can see, is that everyone should agree to their particular definition. They are unable to offer any reasonable arguments to back their claim or to support this extravagant demand of theirs, and because they have no cogent arguments to offer, they pretend to turn their nose down on semantic discussion -- all the while repeating, over and over and over, their own position, which is essentially no more than a semantic position.
Do you see the absurdity of such an attempt? First of all, the position they’re advocating is itself questionable, as I’ve tried to show earlier ; and secondly, even if one were to grant them this position for the sake of argument, how on earth are they to impose their particular meaning of words -- even when unopposed within these forums -- on to the rest of the world? Might it be that their only intention is to create an echo chamber within these forums, an echo chamber isolated from the big bad world outside, an echo chamber that resonates with their wholly unreasonable pronouncements that they are unable to logically defend?
Not only are these people unable to defend their position when challenged, but they actually have the nerve to attempt to brazen their way through by trying to label such reasonable challenge, through innuendo and implication as opposed to direct honest argument, as pedantic hair-splitting : blithely ignoring the fact that it is they who initiated this linguistic discussion, this particular foray into this particular rabbit hole, in the first place, by initiating and participating extensively in these threads that deal exclusively with the meaning of these two words. The only thing wrong about this linguistic/semantic rabbit hole that they’ve dug for themselves seems to be that it does not quite lead to where they might have hoped it would, because their progress within the rabbit hole has been successfully challenged.
In these “old days” that you speak of, were positions similarly bereft of reasonable justification and argument bolstering them up, routinely paraded around uncontested? The only thing going for these misguided arguments seems to be their repeated assertion, over and over and over again, and the loud and sometimes concerted clamoring : was the volume of this clamoring adequate, in those fabled olden days of yours, to browbeat those with contrary views, and to win the day?
These “old days” of yours, are you sure they actually were as you seem to recall them? That does not really sound like much of a Golden Age to me. More yellow than golden if you ask me.
