Cheerskep wrote: > "Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness..."
I have the notion that your analogy is badly constructed. Conversations typically do not consist of two or more people walking past each other across a room or on a sidewalk, saying one or two sentences and then getting farther apart. The first person says, perhaps, "bumbershoot," and the other person, walking in the opposite direction, replies, "foopgoom." A third person, passing by shortly thereafter, takes a different tack and asserts, "toves," and a fourth person, approaching abeam, asks, "What the hell are the rules here?" In my notion, a conversation is greatly different. The people in a conversation remain in it for a while, typically it occurs not in the dark between two armies, and there is generally more light than gloom (darkness, not glumness). Moreover, people enter the conversation already prepared with a respectable amount of words in their brains to refer to and a similarly respectable grasp of the rules of assembling those words in utterances that produce meanings elsewhere. (Yes, I intended to use the R-E-S-P-E-C-T word because I expect--more than hope--it will produce a conflation of notions.) Anyhow, in a conversation, the "meanings" of the words and statements (as understood by the participants) typically coincide to a large degree, but maybe not perfectly, in which case someone says, "No, that's not exactly what I meant." And things go back and forth several times until each person believes he or she has "understood" the other person or the other person has "understood" him. That's how the fuzziness of communications is reduced to tolerable levels. As to the matter of rules, Cheerskep's counterargument once again relies on an ab ovo sally. But we on this list already have a wide acquaintance with various rules, regulations, and other types of limiters so that when the conversation starts, we can state our "default" use of the words and then wiggle our way to that area of "serviceableness" that Cheerskep talks about. We don't have to go back to parsing the word "rule" to in fact discuss rules in all their permutations. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
