[FRIAM] ordinary language

steve smith sasmyth at swcp.com
Thu Apr 10 13:53:50 EDT 2025


The oft-maligned Chinese Language Simplification 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Character_Simplification_Scheme> 
of the Cultural Revolution seemed on it's face to be an attempt to prune 
back out-of-control language bushiness?  When seen as an attempt at 
social control it seems unconscionable but to curb verbosity and 
/circumloquacity/, well motivated?

Trump's verbal tic of fixating on a word (e.g. "Gro-cer-ies" or 
"Ta-r-iff") seems to be his nod to the under-literate who feel the same 
way when THEY learn a new word?

I'm guiltier than most for (tyring to) add context to the context to the 
context of words I don't fully trust to be exactly what I meant:

    "/I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I
    think what you heard was not what I meant" ?/

  glen wrote:

> [⛧] It also results in a bit of a verbosity explosion, where every 
> polysemic word or phrase needs more phrases to disambiguate it, each 
> of those phrases then needing more phrases, etc.

I do believe it is possible to recognize when someone is trying to 
communicate vs when someone is trying to obfuscate?   I think our 
discussions here of late about LLMs touches on this.  Can I tell if an 
LLM is "trying" to help me research/understand/think-about something" or 
is it just trying to "tell me what I want to hear"?   There are probably 
terms-of-art (a term of art in itself?) for this distinction/spectrum?

While my abstraction of LLMs as a manifold of sub-manifolds with linear 
narratives tracing various sub-manifolds might be misbegotten, it is 
where my head goes often.   The question (for me) is whether there are 
families of sub-manifold (said family a manifold in it's own right?) 
which can be labeled as "righteous" or "good faith" vs "duplicitous" or 
"bad faith".... but to Glen's point, nothing is context free?   A 
narrative arc on a story-world manifold within a story-multiverse (e.g. 
DC vs Marvel, vs ???) represents nested context?

When I worked with lawyers I felt I could tell the difference in the 
legalese I occasionally read if they were trying to be clear or 
obfuscating...  but not sure I could write an algorithm to detect which?

FWIW in the spirit of linguistic hair splitting, one of my favorite 
lines from a fantasy short-story was "the glint of the spark of the 
light of the fire in the eye of the dragon".   Though I'm not sure quite 
why... maybe just a verbosity fetish?


mumble,

  - Steve

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