Improper Nouns

https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1773806.html

by panic • 4 years ago

118 95 4 years ago

siderea.dreamwidth.org

readthenotes1• 4 years ago

I have been ridiculing people for years trying to defuse an argument by saying "it's just a matter of semantics"

'that for once in your miserable excuse for an existence you have finally used the word "semantics" correctly.'

adhesive_wombat• 4 years ago

I'm glad it's not just me that gets wound up by that.

I wonder if it's getting confused (rather ironically!) with semiotics. Saying that it's just a matter of the words used in the argument seems closer to the mark.

Or, maybe, they think it's a fancy way to say "matter of opinion".

avgcorrection• 4 years ago

“I can’t parse this”

What they usually mean is not that they can’t comprehend the grammar. They usually mean that they don’t understand what it means.

Butchered technical term.

yccs27• 4 years ago

Relatively often "I can't parse this" is still about the grammar, more specifically when it's not clear what words belong together. As an example from the article, "certified community behavioral health clinic" is a single token, but if you don't know the term, you won't parse it correctly. In other cases a sentence might contain technical terms as adjectives/adverbs where it's not clear which word they modify. Or possibly the content is just so confusing that you begin to doubt you parsed everything correctly...

cammil• 4 years ago

Is it on purpose that "improper noun" is itself an "improper noun"?

rendall• 4 years ago

I also thought the use of "construct" to mean "abstraction structured like diagnosis which doesn't describe a pathology" was not itself an improper noun, but is probably how they get started. If everyone in the field started using "construct" that way, it would become an improper noun.

rocqua3• 4 years ago

I actually think "construct" much like "disorder" is a kind of marker for an improper noun. Both are so formal as to suggest that "adjective adjective construct" is a formal term. Such improper nouns, I think, are less insidious than improper nouns without such a marker. Because they are easier to detect.

If the "highly sensitive person" were instead called the "highly sensitive personality construct" it would be much less confusing as an improper noun. It is clearly unwieldy here, but that is partially down to construct being too vague, and presumably down to me only spending 10seconds on the name.

As an example of how "disorder" helps suppose that "Persistent depressive disorder" were instead called "Persistent depression". That would clearly be much more confusing.

rralian• 4 years ago

There is an elaborate joke here that I find hilarious. I am in awe of the author.

falcor84• 4 years ago

I believe it indeed was. I love these "Autological" words[0].

My favorite by far is the acronym ETLA (Extended Three Letter Acronym), which of course had to be invented because FLA (Four Letter Acronym) is not autological[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autological_word

[1] http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TLA.html

teknopaul• 4 years ago

Improper nouns are just starting out in life, with time they will become improper-nouns subsequently impropernouns and then if sufficiently misunderstood by enough people they might become propnouns.

strogonoff• 4 years ago

“Improper nouns”, where the meaning of a phrase is more than a sum of the meanings of its constituent words, are not just strictly technical terms. It’s in the way we think and communicate, a word or a grouping of words encountered repeatedly in a certain context acquires a meaning influenced by said context.

“Freedom of speech” might be a good example of one. It is a shortcut for a certain concept that is fairly expansive, and not without ambiguities of its own. Now it’s common to see it deconstructed into constituent words, and a sum of their meanings (selected by the communicator) used to give the phrase a new meaning that suits current communication goals the most.

Occasionally one party may use the resulting mismatch in meaning to blame the other for duplicity: how dare they say our country has free speech (1) whereas what it has isn’t even close to free speech (2)?

Semantics is fun!

senectus1• 4 years ago

Grammar Nazi's and the like always amuse me (and to be honest I appreciate the correction), unless I'm rushed, or stressed or angry. Then I want to pummel the idiots.

gsinclair• 4 years ago

This punctuation nazi right here would like to issue a correction regarding your apostrophe.

cwillu2• 4 years ago

The apostrophe in question is properly marking the omission of an “e”.

‹ducks and runs away to enjoy the fallout from a safe distance›

zeristor• 4 years ago

Wouldn’t the foremost thought of the “green” building being the one that is the most sustainable uses the least energy and water in its running.

Not that this adds that much, but it’s a very weird omission.

kapep• 4 years ago

The author says the first example is slightly incorrect because the Green (a name) and green (a color) have a very different meaning. The example that follows is using the physical color of the building and the conceptual color of the building in some color coded system, which in both cases are arguably colors.

I think the author would probably consider 'green energy' to also be a 'slightly incorrect' example because it doesn't actually refer to the color green. I guess it would be correct if the antonym of green energy were also named after a color.

tesseract• 4 years ago

One of the more confusing examples of this I've encountered was a manufacturer describing a material with improved eco-friendliness over a prior version as "dark green"... taking the color metaphor perhaps a bit too seriously. (For what it's worth, the material happened to be black in color.)

alanbernstein3• 4 years ago

Why a weird omission? If you're trying to find a building, the color or the name would both be helpful, while a description of some internal, invisible aspect of the building would not.

agileAlligator• 4 years ago

I was thinking about this very phenomenon the other day, and struggling to come up with a name for it.

cfiggers• 4 years ago

In Mortimer Adler's _How to Read a Book_ (1972) [0], he tackles this idea by distinguishing between "words" and "terms." Chapter 8 is called "Coming to Terms With an Author" and it is essentially all about this idea of "improper nouns" but under a different name.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-Intelligent/dp/...

cwillu2• 4 years ago

“Now, I know, right now, there's someone out there reading this, rolling their eyes, and thinking, "this is all just semantics", and I want to let you know, whomever you are, that for once in your miserable excuse for an existence you have finally used the word "semantics" correctly.”

hackernewds• 4 years ago

I find this to be an obnoxious take, that is most certainly accompanied by a robust scoffy exhale that inspires a backwards head tilt.

wzwy2• 4 years ago

She’s a psychologist, isn’t she?

Maybe a lot of her clients had said: “It’s all just semantics. I don’t want those, I want solutions. I swear I should’ve just taken meds only and none of these so-called therapies”.

By the way, I’m pro-therapy. That would probably be what my nightmare patient would say, if I was a psychologist.

MauranKilom2• 4 years ago

I thought this was an incredibly antagonizing paragraph in an otherwise pleasant essay. Who hurt the writer?

zokier• 4 years ago

Is Pluto a planet? IAUs definition of planet is just another "improper noun"; common word that has been afterwards enshrined with a technical definition.

Robotbeat2• 4 years ago

That was intentional, though.

ajuc2• 4 years ago

In the company where I worked there was an old telnet-like technology called "green screen". People would say "have you checked if this feature works in Greenscreen", or "is the price calculated same as in Greenscreen".

The Greenscreen - of course - is actually blue :).

BTW non-English-speaking teams have a slight advantage here. Technical terms and proper nouns in English are used in English, while everything else (for example - referring to a screen that's actually green) is done in our native language, so there's no misunderstanding.

unsupp0rted• 4 years ago

Works great for Korean speakers, who don't really distinguish green and blue like English speakers do.

In many languages, the colors described in English as "blue" and "green" are colexified, i.e. expressed using a single cover term. To describe this English lexical gap, linguists use the portmanteau word grue, from green and blue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...

silvestrov• 4 years ago

Also works well when the GreenScreen is a telnet window in Windows.

ajuc2• 4 years ago

Interesting, so that's where the name comes from. We're using a different client now tho :)

xigoi3• 4 years ago

These improper nouns are unfortunately common in mathematics. Terms like “real number” are often confusing to non-mathematicians, who assume a deeper meaning behind them.

This is why we need Lojban.

twawaaay• 4 years ago

As a bit of a mathematician (well... "studied theoretical math" would be more accurate), mathematics would not function without those names. And no, Lojban would not help.

In math you build abstractions on top of abstractions on top of abstractions on top of abstractions to the point where you a single word can carry so much meaning you may need years of study and a whole shelf of books dedicated to the subject just to understand it in its entirety. Unwinding whole meaning of the term would be absolutely impractical.

No, we don't need Lojban. Shorthands are making it easier to work with math, not harder.

If you are newbie and you want to understand any of it I can assure you, the complete description of the term without using any abstraction would be completely meaningless to you anyway. Slowly learning those abstractions and building up to what you want to understand is still the best, easiest way.

xigoi3• 4 years ago

Thanks, but I'm not a newbie by any means.

Yes, names are necessary. I just wish there was a clear indication that they are names. Nobody is confused by the term “Dedekind cut” because it's clearly a name.

This is partly a fault of English (or other natural languages) and partly of math nomenclature.

vharuck• 4 years ago

Interesting factoid: "real numbers" are called that to distinguish them from "imaginary numbers." The latter term was not meant as an improper noun, but a proper insult. Some mathematicians called them imaginary to imply that branch of mathematics had no basis or use in reality. The term stuck, even though we found plenty of uses.

xigoi3• 4 years ago

Well, that's not the first time something like this happened. An ancient mathematician was murdered for discovering irrational numbers, and the name given to them is also quite insulting.

bmacho• 4 years ago

There is an assumption in mathematics that if we use an adjective with a noun, it will specialize the noun, that is, it adds an additional constraint to it, yet it remains to be the original noun as well. (In other words, the Liskov substitution principle holds.)

It is almost always wrong. An adjective can generalize the noun, which is funny, because in that case either the adjective or the noun must be wrong. It's called the "red herring principle"[0], that is, red herrings are not red, or are not herrings. Like:[1]

    - a manifold with boundary is not a manifold, or it doesn't have a boundary, but can't be both
    - a nonassociative algebra, is either associative, or not an algebra
    - multivalued functions, partial functions, contravariant functors, noncommutative geometries, etc etc etc

[0] : https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/red+herring+principle

[1] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/red+herring+principle#examples

Bakary5• 4 years ago

If a non-mathematician is confused in this way, they won't be able to use the concept for anything useful anyway. I'm saying this as a non-mathematician.

makeitdouble• 4 years ago

Would this “improper noun” concept be an extension of “term of art” (which is also used in the article) ?

I fully agree with the author, on the importance of being aware they exist. The insure example is apt, and people also get tripped by law and contracts wording that refer to specific concepts which are barely related to the word used.

shireboy• 4 years ago

This seems like an area for AI research. These are the points where a general AI will have a hard time, because language parsing is not enough. It has to “know” the context -of say MIT’s Green Building vs green building- and be able to determine which is being referenced. Maybe not the best example, but here is one interpretation from Dall-e, which I assume is not accurate: https://labs.openai.com/s/DQQ2lJP0psNqIGLy3XJa4usg

numpad0• 4 years ago

That is also one of failure modes of translation, sometimes referred to as "engrish". Even human translators can't avoid this type of "mistakes", there just never are full context in texts.

1: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4398258/

adunk• 4 years ago

This article defines the concept "improper noun" as a phrase that carries a specific meaning that may be different from its colloquial meaning. Such phrases can be confusing because they carry a double meaning, and because most people would only be familiar with only one of them - the colloquial meaning.

I believe that this confusion is strongest for native speakers. When you learn a language as a secondary language, you get used to pattern-match phrases in the new language. At first, each phrase is just a combination of words that you have to learn what they mean, one by one. After a while, you start to see the connection between phrases and their words, but you still retain that ability to simply pattern-match phrases and assign an arbitrary meaning to them. As a native speaker, it is much easier to interpret the colloquial meaning and you may have to almost force yourself to pattern-match the non-colloquial meaning.

I would also think that there are several subjects of study that may be helpful in interpreting these improper nouns:

* Mathematics. You soon get used to the style of thinking that starts with an assumption and proceeds to reason around the assumption, without defining exactly what the assumption is. "Assume we have a number, i, that satisfies i^2 = -1", and so on. It is straightforward to extend this type of thinking to improper nouns.

* Programming. In programming, we just define things, such as variable names or classes, and then we use them. The same thinking can be applied to improper nouns.

* Law. In contracts and agreements, is important to have precise meaning of every term, so contracts often start by explicitly defining all terms used in the contract. This type of thinking is easy to extend to improper nouns.

MauranKilom2• 4 years ago

I expect most (if not all) languages have figures of speech that, just like "improper nouns", tend to mean something only tangentially related to the literal words. Whether most people can recognize and/or understand a novel one immediately likely varies though.

I would agree that you tend to notice this more when learning a different language: As a child, you don't understand many things adults say and pick up these phrases among a lot of other inexplicable language. But when you later learn a new language, any apparent contradictions between the meaning of individual words and their combinations stick out much more.

rocqua3• 4 years ago

A big difference between figures of speech and improper nouns is that the first are almost universal. Moreover, getting a figure of speach 'wrong' will generally cause quick reaction. Hence they are easy to learn, and there is a self-correcting mechanism. Meanwhile an improper noun can evade detection by those not in the know, and there is no self-correcting mechanism of wide public consciousness to teach those who are not in the know.

totetsu• 4 years ago

Mouse events in Java.

rocqua3• 4 years ago

I think Improper Nouns as described here also have a really big upside, especially for the main users of them. That is probably why they have proliferated recently.

These Improper Nouns are quite descriptive and therefore help people who are picking up a field. The diagnosis "Persistent depressive disorder" is, I think, a better name than "Green's Disorder" (presuming the diagnosis was introduced by someone called Green). Once you know an improper noun is an improper noun, and you know the context in which it was coined, then all of a sudden, it becomes much clearer than if it was truly a proper noun.

I think, accidentally, the old tendency of naming things in latin or ancient greek had the effect of marking things as Improper Nouns whilst still allowing people who understand those languages to get the description. Similarly, the "Persistent depressive disorder" name has some marker of being an improper noun: the noun 'disorder'. In that sense the Green building, or a highly sensitive person, are much worse examples. Because they contain no hint of being improper nouns.

Perhaps this 'marker' approach is a nice solution. Coin a whole set of nouns such as disorder, theorem, etc (examples feel hard to come by). Then use improper nouns as this 'base-noun' with a whole bunch of descriptive adjectives. Then any use of the base-noun marks it as part of an improper noun. Within this idea, I think we would need a base-noun for the concept of 'an organization that meets some legal definition'. Similar base-nouns for other things meeting legal definitions might be needed. If I were to dream perhaps you could give a normal noun some suffix to designate that it is not a X, but an X meeting a specific legal definition. If the suffix were -lex then the example of "certified community behavioral health clinic" would become a "certified community behavioral health cliniclex".

icegreentea2• 4 years ago

Engaging with this section:

I expect some of you, confronted with these examples, are getting pissed off that improper nouns are even a thing. For what it's worth, it pisses me off too. I don't think it's deliberate deceptiveness, but I do think it's the rhetorical equivalent of negligent malpractice. It's a pattern of language usage which casts more shadow than light, and, as far as I can tell, has absolutely no upside unless you can find some benefit to causing misunderstanding and confusion.

I think something that causes technical improper nouns to form, is that the common reading and understanding of the phrase is actually imprecise or ambiguous. A field finds the concept useful, and then tries paring down the ambiguity and imprecision to make it even more useful, while also trying to keep -some- form of conciseness, and now you have an improper noun.

The tension is between replacing every instance of "preventative care" with "federally mandated fully insured care".

wzwy2• 4 years ago

This illustrates a difference between proper nouns and common nouns. Common noun phrases describe their referent. Proper noun phrases do not describe, they merelydesignate. A woman named Joy can be in a bad mood; a man named Ernest can dissemble; and building named Green can be a light brown tinged with crud.
Call them improper nouns. It's like a stealth proper noun: like a proper noun phrase, it designates, without describing, but it sure looks like it's just garden-variety description.It has none of the ordinary indications that proper nouns do that twig us it is designating without describing. Proper nouns, for instance, are designated with capital letters. In real-world MIT, the confusion fostered by the name of the Green Building is strictly an aural artifact. There's no confusion that the Green Building is not merely a green building in writing. Of course, we have no capital letters in spoken English, so there's ambiguity aloud. In our hypothetical color-coded MIT, that ambiguity persists in writing, because "the green building" is not just not a building that is physically green, but not capitalized either: it's an improper noun.

I can understand this part. Improper Noun is not a grammatical error, but the designation of a word that purely designates as a word that describes.

First, over on Reddit's r/science, somebody posted an article about research into the "highly sensitive person". A lot of commenters were very upset and bewildered by what they took the research to be saying about people who were particularly "sensitive", in some sense or another.

The problem here is that "highly sensitive person" doesn't just refer to people who are sensitive. Perhaps it should be in initial capitals, as a proper proper noun – "Highly Sensitive Person" – but in the popular press article, it wasn't. It's a psychological construct proposed by psychologist Elaine Aron. It is a technical term, with a technical definition and criteria. It is, in other words, an improper noun. The findings do not concern sensitivity per se, they concern people who meet the criteria for this psychological construct designated, non-obviously, by the improper noun "highly sensitive person".

One commenter angrily asked why would a researcher assume someone who is very easily annoyed by subtle physical sensations would also be prone to emotional rejection sensitivity. The answer is simple: the researcher didn't assume that. That's definitional to Aron's HSP construct. If you don't have both, you don't meet the criteria. Highly Sensitive People aren't just highly sensitive people, they're people who meet sufficient criteria for the Highly Sensitive People construct.

But I don’t understand this example. First, it’s most probably because I haven’t read anything about Highly Sensitive Person before, so everything I say next is 99% BS.

Second, in this case, the jargonification or technicalisation of the word ‘sensitive’ have meanings that overlap with the non-technical ‘sensitive’. It’s an improper Improper Noun: both ‘sensitive’ describe something similar, but the technical version has expanded the word to mean beyond the common knowledge, yet it still retains its HSP construct’s designatory power. It’s still a common noun, a noun that describes; maybe call it a Noble Noun, seeing how high and mighty it seems to be from the Common Noun.

Very interesting read, nonetheless.

Robotbeat2• 4 years ago

I think this explains a lot of the political firestorm that has happened as academic discussions of things like racism have entered the public sphere. “Institutional racism,” “implicit bias,” and a bunch of other things that have technical definitions are just introduced to the common lexicon to people who are already not going to be highly receptive to this sort of thing, and it often adds more heat than light.

tekacs2• 4 years ago

The author bemoans that, unlike proper nouns, ‘improper nouns’ don’t carry any stylistic indicator in English to indicate that they are different from the baseline.

In my past experience I’ve found that there is an indicator amongst some (trained?) writers of English, which is single quotes:

- Go to the ‘green’ building

(this reads as: it’s not literally green, it’s green in some metaphorical sense like their colour coding system)

- He thinks that ‘improper nouns’ don’t carry a stylistic indicator

(look I even did it above!)

alanbernstein3• 4 years ago

Did you miss the fact that this first example was in the context of spoken conversation? Or the other examples, which were written, but somehow also failed to use any indicator?

tekacs2• 4 years ago

No? The author explicitly points out that there's a difference between the spoken and written case and complains that there's no written indicator. I'm speaking to that case.

SilasX2• 4 years ago

On the main topic: I ran into this recently when someone said it was no big deal that someone in a story was a "drama queen". I was like, um, that's someone who unnecessarily escalates conflicts, of course that's the type you want to distance yourself from, are you using a different meaning? I cited whatever sources I could find that spoke to the issue, which agreed with my usage, and the other party insisted it was wrong but couldn't find backing for their own usage.

EDIT: Another great example of the dynamic on HN. One time I expressed skepticism that airlines could rearrange seats in a particular way because they were constrained in how they could reconfigure the layout, and would need special permission for a new configuration.

The topic experts were happy to roll their eyes and lecture me that "the FAA doesn't regulate configurations" but didn't seem to notice that there might be ambiguity in what is being referred to by a "configuration", and so could have clarified what kinds of changes are vs aren't permitted in a way that sidesteps the jargon.

Instead, they just assumed a) I was using the term correctly, and b) I was making an obviously wrong statement under that correct definition. This then let them conclude c) the only reason I would persist in being skeptical is because I automatically refuse to listen to experts.

The right approach would have been to 1) identify how the word "configuration" is used in this domain and how it might differ from the lay meaning of that term, and 2) use one's domain expertise to give detail ("color") on what the boundary is between changes that do vs. don't need approval, and why the airline's plan would fall squarely in the latter.

That would have made it a clarifying, enlightening experience for all readers, rather than a game of "I'm high status, you're not".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665250

reportgunner• 4 years ago

If you're meeting someone at the Green building for the first time just tell them that the Green building is not actually green.

SilasX2• 4 years ago

I had a funny parallel to the Green building example. (That people assume is the color green but is named after the person with surname Green.)

At a conference, Effective Altruism Global 2016, on the Berkeley campus, they kept referring to (what I parsed as) the "poly room", which I assumed was a room sponsored/organized by the polyamory community (which has a non-trivial overlap with EA).

Only later did I realize they were saying the Pauley room, which (like Green above) came from the donors' surnames.

The thing is, I try to be super vigilant about ambiguous parsings. If there's a board game called "Five", I would never induce confusion by asking "Do you have Five?" instead saying, "Do you have the board game Five?" If I went to MIT and were taking to an outsider, I would probably refer to it as the "Ida Green" or "Cecil Green" building.

(Side note: At Texas A&M, they warn you that if someone refers to the "coldest buliding", you probably misheard them saying "the Koldus building".)

dahart2• 4 years ago

Likewise, if you heard someone had "dysthymia", you might have no idea what it meant, but you would recognize it was some sort of technical term

It’s true that there’s a downside to using regular words for technical terms, and the problem isn’t the regular words so much as the fact that people, all of us, love making assumptions, and we love demanding that words must meet a single literal interpretation exactly and completely. But something I’ve always thought is fascinating about Latin (edit: or Greek) technical terms is that for Latin speakers, they were regular words. Some of the Latin terms we think of as technical in English are even ridiculously generic in Latin. This using of regular words for jargon has always been there, it’s not something new. It would be interesting to know if Rome had the same issue with these ‘improper nouns’.

I love the call to attention though; recognizing that people might be saying something different than what you think is incredibly useful. Realizing that my reactionary incredulity is actually me misunderstanding the words because I know less about the subject than the other person, that keeps me from making an ass of myself often. Not always, but often. :P

Telemakhos• 4 years ago

Dysthymia is, in fact, Greek, not Latin, but anyone who knows ancient Greek would immediately understand the word. Greek and Latin used to be normal parts of a basic grammar- and high-school education, even at the beginning of the twentieth century; by the end of the century, we were instead teaching remedial English in universities. The consequent narrowing of both vocabulary and roots from which neologism might arise may be responsible for the growth of the unwieldy and confusing noun phrases serving as terms of art: would not "psychotrophium" sound better than Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic?

There's another factor at work in lengthy periphrasis, too: people seem to need length these days to lend credibility. For example, my church never calls itself a church now but always a "community of believers" or "faith community." Missionaries report not on tribes but "people groups." Monosyllables have fallen out of favor, because professionals must embrace sesquipedalian verbosity.

Many of the ridiculously generic Latinate terms, by the way, especially in anatomy, were imposed in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. The "hippocampus," for example, was a seahorse until 1587, when the term was applied to part of the brain. At the time, surgeons learned entirely in Latin, and they probably had no difficulty differentiating between medical and marine definitions based on context. As far as ancient Rome goes, or ancient Greece for that matter, homonymy (which is really what the author of the article means) and amphiboly were taught and warned against in the schools: clarity is a virtue for rhetoricians and a duty of dialecticians.

dahart2• 4 years ago

Dysthymia is, in fact, Greek, not Latin

Ack, of course! Thank you!!

homonymy […] and amphiboly were taught

Yeah so maybe the issue is that it’s being taught less. Or maybe this is a symptom of having the internet combined with a huge percent of the population having some advanced schooling. There’s perhaps a lot more exposure today to technical terminology for the average person than there was hundreds or thousands of years ago. Maybe this problem isn’t new but has increased in scale.

Using regular English words has advantages though, and I feel like studies in medicine, math, music, and many others that use a lot of Greek, Latin, Italian, etc. for reason of history or in some cases of high-brow convention, might be better, could ease learning and reduce confusion and miscommunication if we stopped speaking in a foreign language.

dfxm12• 4 years ago

It doesn't seem like a language issue, but a user error. One person with a lot of knowledge about MIT says to someone with no knowledge of MIT "Go to the Green Building" with no further context, that's on them. Likewise, if you're told to go to the Green building, look around and nothing immediately jumps out, you'd ask for directions, or an address, i.e. a unique identifier that sort of transcends language. "Ah, building 54, thanks". (And let's not discount that maybe the person talking about the Green Building might be unaware of the green building, or even colorblind)

People can be obtuse to show off insider knowledge. Readers can find stuff for which they weren't the intended audience (which is very common post Internet). However, it is important that it seems like even when there's a complete lack of context around the improper noun, our brains are good at understanding that the phrase might mean something else, and we can choose to look it up or not be bothered. I'm not sure if any more signifier is needed. Writers might not even know they're using an improper noun, afterall.

edem• 4 years ago

I accidentally read "pronouns" and I expected the usual woke shit. I'm delighted that this article is not about that.

Bakary5• 4 years ago

These improper nouns show mostly a failure of the listener (not that I blame them) to be aware of the underlying culture behind the word.

But to contribute in a useful way to the conversation or the actions involved, you would need that culture already to some extent.

-If you are so unfamiliar with psychology research that your intuition doesn't tell you that Highly Sensitive People might be a category coined by the researcher, you are unlikely to be able to add to the research without getting up to speed with that culture in the process.

-If your intuition doesn't tell you that repeated expressions in medical insurance probably have specific contractual definitions, you probably need outside help with the insurance discussion as soon as possible anyway.

- If you can't come to the conclusion that community centers or whatever implies specific local laws and politics, you would need to delve into those local politics anyway before acting or contributing productively following the content of the article

The Green/green building example makes sense to some extent, but I also cannot help but feel that it is a failure of intuition as well, or at least a failure of experience in human communication. You would hear green building and probably assume there's information missing because you know colors can be very vague and subjective, or the fact that you know to some extent how colleges work and how internal culture is strong in those places would prompt you to assume it is a proper or improper noun on the spot.

StrictDabbler• 4 years ago

The author kind of cheats by picking phrases that involve multiple words. I think if you examine a single word the whole concept falls apart.

An example from the HVAC industry: we have something called a reset.

An operational sequence for an AC unit will say "the unit supply air temperature is based on an inverse outdoor air temperature reset."

I'd challenge anybody in any other STEM field to look at this and correctly intuit what a reset is. You won't find a specific definition that matches in any ordinary dictionary.

It turns out that a "reset" is a linear mapping from one range to another. Literally just a scale and offset. You are picking up a range of numbers and "setting" it on a new range. No state is involved, just a 1-1 relational mapping between ranges.

So is that an improper noun just because there's a more popular meaning of the word "reset"? I don't think so. It's just an unpopular definition for the word. If you are unaware of this definition you will misunderstand the sentence but that's true of all words with multiple meanings.

Also the phrase "improper noun" has the existing meaning "a noun that describes something general (rather than that which is purely unique)", so there's an painful irony in defining a new specialized meaning for the term. I'm not sure if that irony is intended but it annoys me.

Edit: Why is the article even about nouns? This happens with verbs all the time. Every three minutes I'm thinking of another reason this article is a vague and largely incorrect waste of characters.

justin_oaks2• 4 years ago

Such single words with different meanings in different contexts are probably best described as industry-specific jargon than improper nouns. Even so, I'm still greatly upset when people take word and give it a more specific meaning in a technical context.

For example, the term "container" such as in Docker container or LXC container. Container is such a generic term, but has a much more specific meaning in computing. I wish someone had invented a new term for it.

As a good example, I take "blog" which was basically a new term for a new thing. I know that it has it's origins from the term "web log", but now everyone just says "blog". It's nice to have a new a term instead of taking old words and putting them into a new context.

Bakary5• 4 years ago

Amusingly enough 'set' has the largest number of different definitions in the English language!

To steelman the author's argument, I think it would have been better to focus the blog post on how people can sometimes deliberately or carelessly obfuscate discussions when using technical terms or technical uses of common terms. For instance, a user elsewhere in the thread mentioned how the word 'racism' can have at least three distinct meanings in North America that are used in cavalier ways sometimes.

justin_oaks2• 4 years ago

Use of proper nouns are also commonly a failure of the speaker/writer instead of the listener. When the speaker/writer uses technical terms in speaking to the public then it's their fault for not recognizing that those terms WILL be misunderstood by the public.

Consider the case of discussing "preventative care" vs "medically necessary care". If someone from a medical facility or health insurance company used those terms when talking with a layperson then they've failed. The layperson certainly doesn't understand that those terms are have a specific meaning in the industry and they will likely misunderstand the terms.

Bakary5• 4 years ago

I don't necessarily disagree entirely with the author, and it's definitely true that the onus is to some extent on the speaker. It's just that the core of the author's argument can be redefined as the person not being equipped for the conversation, and in that case they would need to be equipped anyway for anything useful to happen.

"Preventative care" etc. is what I was referring two in the bullet point about medical insurance. If you cannot intuit that such terms have contractual definitions, you are already deeply in trouble and would need assistance to navigate the insurance situation you are in anyway. Even if the issuer clarified it a bit, you would already be in trouble for other reasons taking place elsewhere in the process or with other terms.

nullc2• 4 years ago

then it's their fault for not recognizing that those terms WILL be misunderstood by the public

feature or bug?

alecbz• 4 years ago

Despite the occasional hate, I think the main benefit of acronyms and initialisms is turning "improper nouns" into proper nouns. "Highly sensitive person" => HSP, e.g. The fact that the acronym obscures is a feature; it prevents people from assuming it's a common noun.

smartscience• 4 years ago

Incidentally this is why I see no problem with phrases like 'PIN number', despite others apparently being very bothered by them. English does not use a macro preprocessor to expand acronyms.

Bakary5• 4 years ago

Adding sounds to single-syllable words is also helpful to reduce ambiguity.

samatman2• 4 years ago

Constructions like 'PIN number' and 'ATM machine' are just fine from a linguistic standpoint. Using them has class connotations, but that doesn't make them wrong.

andsoitis• 4 years ago

The proper uses of such bivalent phrases is thus one of those knowledge boundaries around groups of people I like to talk about.

They're using "bivalent" improperly. Maybe they mean "bipolar".

Improper Adjectives, if you will.

I think that if you're going to project that you're a grammar expert, you want to temper your communication with a certain amount of humility, lest you err.

csours• 4 years ago

Many people love the book "Normal Accidents", and I agree that it has some good ideas, but it is FULL of these improper nouns.

skybrian• 4 years ago

Another, related phenomenon is when scientists confuse themselves into believing that what they’re studying and a common noun are the same thing. For example, the Big Five traits or whatever “happiness” means in happiness surveys. Labeling an axis with a common noun doesn’t make it coincide with the common meaning, but it ensures it will be confused with it.

This is why scientific names for species are useful. Too bad that practice isn’t used more in other sciences.

More about the problems with surveys: https://carcinisation.com/2020/12/11/survey-chicken/

RajT88• 4 years ago

Yes because scientific names use a dead language and as such has no connotation baggage attached to words.

garmain• 4 years ago

Yes, having studied psychology and neuroscience I get often frustrated how seemingly normal words take on highly specific and often contrasting meanings.

Reading article after article and realising that every author uses "attention', "perception", "motivation" in slightly shifted ways. In principle it makes sense that increased specificity is needed in a particular field. But when the meaning shifts meaningfully between author working on, ostensibly, the same topic the confusion is immense. I have no clue how to tackle this issue.

syrrim• 4 years ago

This was solved in the past by coining new terms in french, or possibly latin. I like the current system more. Granted, people may assume they know what a term means when it's made up of words they understand. But it is usually quite clear from context that a phrase is being used in a technical way, and thus has a specific definition. If you need to know that definition, you can google it easily enough, or even just guess at it.

ThePadawan5• 4 years ago

Lingustic shoutout to Switzerland, where cheesecake contains actual [grated, hard] cheese.

For the German speakers: "Käsekuchen" (literally "cheesecake") in Germany, Poland and other countries of the region uses Quark, which is untranslateable, but is texture-wise somewhere between light cream cheese and pressed Greek Yogurt. It's not usually referred to as a cheese within Germany any more. So Käsekuchen is a sweet cake that goes well with red jam and fresh cream, or served with coffee.

Käsekuchen in Switzerland (again, "cheesecake") is a pie with a filling based on cream and grated hard cheese. If you want the sweet German cake, you have to order "Cheesecake" (using the English word!), not "Käsekuchen".

wodenokoto• 4 years ago

Cream cheese is not cheese?

ThePadawan5• 4 years ago

See, there's a lot of nuance in German.

There is no equivalence between most dairy products between Germany and the English-speaking world. Most terms are just untranslatable because they refer to similar but slightly different concepts.

There is fresh white spreadable cheese ("Frischkäse"), but it's savoury, not sweet, and less fatty than American-style cream cheese. You certainly wouldn't use it to frost a cake. If you spread Frischkäse on a sandwich and handed it to someone as a "cheese sandwich", they would probably be a bit surprised but accept it as a cheese sandwich.

But Frischkäse doesn't go in Käsekuchen. Maybe my description of Quark was misleading, but it is terribly hard to describe since it literally just does not have any equivalent product in the US. Imagine describing marshmallow fluff or root beer to a European.

Asraelite• 4 years ago

Quark, which is untranslateable

Well, "quark" is an English word now too.

jlg23• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(dairy_product)

ThePadawan5• 4 years ago

Touché.

googlryas2• 4 years ago

"Racist" seems to fit the bill here.

Some people view racism as "prejudice + power". This comes from academia and is an example of an improper noun from the article, but has found its way outside of it through, I'll paraphrase - Twitter SJWs.

Then, you have the traditional colloquial definition of racism, which is just "disliking someone because of their skin color".

Then, you have an expansion on the colloquial definition, which brings all sorts of other traits under the umbrella of racism, where basically any kind of xenophobia may be referred to as racism.

I think we have 3 very common beliefs about the definition of racism floating around in America, which is a shame since it is such a focal point of half the conversations in America, and the people talking to each other probably have different internal definitions of this word.

samatman2• 4 years ago

This is the mistake theory version of what's going on: racism, a term which is not that old, but which in the Civil Rights era had a broadly agreed-upon meaning, somehow became a term of art, by accident, and now sometimes people mean two things by it.

The conflict theory is that this conflation was deliberately promulgated to serve power. Then it would be, not an improper noun, but a weaponized ambiguity.

googlryas2• 4 years ago

Promulgate whose power? The powers that be, or academic/"Twitter SJW" power? I'm not convinced that it is a particularly effective weapon, since most normal people would be confused and not convinced when someone posits that a black person saying "All white people must die" is not racist.

nullc2• 4 years ago

If you want to avoid contributing to this language abuse in your own writing it can be helpful to include the authority with the improper noun.

For example "Part 314 preventative care" (authority made up).

The most common and most innocent way these arise is that when some source, rule, process, or law refines or clarifies a definition for good and proper reasons, then people go around using the definition divorced from that context.

Even if you don't know and can't find or don't want to be bothered to look up the authority, you can still indicate the improper noun use by saying "insurance jargon preventative care" or even just putting it in quote: "preventative care".

This doesn't help if you're participating in jargon and don't know it, but in many (most?) cases the authors of confusing text do know it-- it's their own industries/groups jargon after all.

mgraczyk• 4 years ago

Some STEM ones I could think of being very confusing to people.

"set of measure zero"

"Saddle point"

"Ladder operator"

"Top of tree"

"Nested loops"

"A star search" ;)

zharknado• 4 years ago

“Disruptive innovation” and “growth mindset” are my two favorite ones.

Or least favorite ones. The ones I get the most frustrated about people misunderstanding.

Improper Nouns

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