Just a college professor trying to impress with his lexicon. =d>
It reminds me of the time some friends and I were sitting around talking. I used the term "per capita" in the conversation. One of the guys asked me what it meant. I was a bit surprised. We were all around 30 years old. I have used and heard others use the term for 15 years or so. At first I thought he was kidding me. He is a bit of a joker but also one of the kindest people I know. I certainly wouldn't want to laugh at him and hurt his feelings.
I told him it meant, "per person". He asked one of the best questions I have ever heard. He asked why didn't I use the term per person in the first place. I said perhaps I should have. I was simply using the term I hear all the time. I told him perhaps we as a society should use phrases that will be more commonly understood.
Originally Posted by: wpr
Welllll, no.
The problem with this approach is that as you limit your vocabulary, more and more vagueness creeps into your usage. While "per person" and "per capita" probably are interchangeable, there are going to be places where you're going to have to know whether to distinguish between both of them and another term (e.g., "per household"), and you're going to need to know whether per person/per capita or that other term is more appropriate. If you focus people on just using basic vocabulary, they fail to develop the same skills of distinguishing between close-but-not-quite-the-same-subject.
Another synonym for "per capita" is "per head." "Head" is an even simpler word than "person." Should we only learn "per head"? How should we count people? It isn't always obvious.
I'm not saying people should emulate French literary critics in using $10 words, much less the academic practice of creating neologism after neologism ("new word") by adding a gratuitous -ist or -istic subject. Those are instances of pedantic vocabulary to blur and make meaning less precise. But emulation of William F. Buckley or our own Rourke is actually good for us. Yes, we'll usually use a $10 word where an agreed-upon $1 word will do. But we'll also make ourselves into more precise thinkers.
Because that ability to remove ambiguity in service of precision is a skill that becomes ever-more-important in a global economy. Everyone in the world may speak English, but everyone also speaks "broken" English. We're never going to be able to insist on precise commonality, so we had better have skills at making the uncommon (to us) more precise.
For example, I'm currently trying to teach myself some "fuzzy set theory." One of the books I am using (purchased from a seller in Poland) is written by a Japanese author and published by a German publisher. It's a good book, but it is missing a lot of definite and indefinite articles. This is not surprising to me -- my experience with students and colleagues is that a many Asians struggle with getting these little "the" and "a" and "an" correct. And, over the years, I've found ways of dealing with that vagueness when I listen to such a person speak or read what they have written, ways that allow me to subconsciously add the correct article without much thought. I know the difference between "an equation" and "the equation" -- not only do I share the common language of English articles, I have lots and lots of practice with choosing which one to use for which thinking situation.
But when I lack more nuanced vocabulary (as I do when it comes to fuzzy match), then all of a sudden "a" and "the" become giant road barriers to understanding. Not only do I not know which one to insert into the sentence, I don't know whether one is missing. I don't even know when to look for one.
Here's another example. I'm studying fuzzy sets because I want to find a recursive model that will allow for multiple "education" decision-makers making decisions under uncertainty based both on what others have done in the past and are expected to do in the future. As it sits right now, my (non-fuzzy) model has four decisions, each with a different wealth constraint. So I find this fuzzy model that seems to be exactly what I'm looking for ... but when I try reading it more carefully I come on the following sentence, "The system explicitly assigns each decision unit a unique objective, a set of decision variables, and a set of common constraints which will affect all decision units." Okay, the "decision unit" is a bit annoying (I read it to be equivalent to "decisionmaker(s)"), but that isn't the real problem for me. The real problem is that word "common" combined with "affect all". Does it mean "affect everyone in some way" or does it mean "affect everyone in the same way"? Now the sentence does have a citation (by what looks to be a South Asian author), but we don't get that journal here and I don't want to spend $22 (the online price) for one article that I may or may not be able to read, and which may or may not have some different "second language" mixed in. On the other hand, it will, I think, end up being a make or break it interpretation. If "common" means "some", the model will work for me; if "same", it probably won't.
I am sure that anyone who practices this particular kind of dynamic programming regularly knows exactly how "common ...will affect all" should be read. But none of those people are here either. Just me and my ignorance that has vague notions of dynamic programming lingering thirteen years past my PhD and some just acquired notions of how the math of fuzziness works.
It isn't just that I lack the vocabulary. Virtually every word used by this Japanese author is a "common word" for me, a word that I use every day. It's that I lack the precise meaning that this community of scholars assigns to those common terms.
And the same is true of members of any group -- scholarly or otherwise -- that seeks to talk with each other. One needs common ground to have a conversation -- but one needs a lot of common ground; and the more complex the conversation, the bigger "a lot" becomes.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)