Willliam writes: "Cheerskep surely realizes that communication is a participatory event in time and thus requires active creative work by all involved. Cheerskep seems to take the position of the fully passive recipient in a linguistic exchange, a position that requires the other participants to do all the creative work re signs and somehow pass that on to him. No, Cheerskep needs to participate in constructing the context in which the signs are created."
(Michael writes: "When you participate merely as a referee of linguistic or logical usage, I stop reading with close attention. You're being a hallway monitor." I think Michael should probably quit this posting here, because I'll do again here the thing that irks him - that is, preaching a general tenet or practice rather than dwelling on specific word-ambiguities (though I'll dwell on one or two). I want to believe that Michael as a teacher would take more satisfaction in correcting a constantly faulty practice in one of his students, than in simply correcting an occasional product of that fault.) Contrary to William's apparent belief that I'm a passive recipient in linguistic exchanges, I'm just the opposite. As everyone else is. I've repeatedly advanced this general tenet: words are inert; they do nothing; all the work after the moment of initial reception of the word-sound or sight is carried out by the receiving and processing apparatus, the reader's (or listener's) "mind". From the instant I hear or see a word, my mind has to go to work, otherwise very little that we call "cognition" will arise in the mind. We might call the mind's work the effort to "make sense" of what has just been received. This is not to say the speaker/writer has done nothing, only that from the moment of his deliverance of his sounds/scriptions, the "doing" will all be by the receivers. It's now up to them to process the sounds/scriptions the speaker/writer has delivered. The receiver's mind will retrieve from his memory's inventory-shelves loads of associations with what was just delivered; his mind will manipulate the rising notions, re-combine them, add to them; it will think, feel, invent. This implies it's the writer's job to do what he can to channel the receiving mind's activity, usher it to the new notions the writer wants the reader to entertain. "Communication" does indeed require participation by both the deliverer and the recipient. I'd claim that the reader's responsibility to participate demands that he read closely, and question what he reads. That's why I'd claim the position I take on this general issue is the opposite of "passive" reading. Destructively passive reading is marked by a failure to notice or choosing to ignore ambiguities like those brought to this thread by the word 'rules' (and 'content', 'context', 'express', 'signs', and others.) But notice: the word 'rules' is brought to the thread by the writers. The writers also have a responsibility to avoid passivity; they should not set words down without examining them with an eye to how the reader might go wrong. In fiction and poetry, writers often have good reason to use words that are wrapped in ambiguities; in non-fiction they should almost always avoid them assiduously. I realize that my mode of "parsing" words irritated Michael, and I regret that. Michael quite understandably doesn't like the feeling of being lectured to in a "conversation". Moreover, he thinks it's unnecessary. He writes: "It would have gotten to that point soon enough, I suspect. [I.e. readers and writers on this thread would sense the ambiguity.] Or at least to the point where one person would say, "By 'rule,' I mean xyz."" But readers shouldn't wait passively for the writers to become alert to the fact they may be misunderstood. Among other reasons, the reader who espies an ambiguity realizes he can't know what was on the writer's mind. It's not wrong to say so. In fact, I'd say it's wrong not to cite the fault in what he's just read. After all, the reader has to figure that other readers are -- or should be -- unsure what the writer is "saying". Or those other readers may feel they do "understand" the writer because a serviceably clear notion arose their minds -- but the very nature of ambiguous words is that they can occasion a whole range of different notions in different readers, each of whom may feel he has understood the writer. Believe it: I don't question every mistakable usage I see. But I hope I question key ones, and in this instance 'rules' was the very title of the thread. I don't concede it was wrong of me to ask the various users of the word 'rules' to describe the notion they have in mind. I myself want questioning readers. We've had on our forum listers who were seldom if ever challenged, and it was clear that the tacit reason was that the other readers just didn't take them seriously, judging that they hardly ever said anything worthwhile. It long ago occurred to me the two most gratifying kinds of readers I can have in my non-fiction are these: The first is those who acknowledge they've just learned something. That sounds egocentric, I know. But I think it's true of most of us. And it's a reason why it's kind to tell someone when he's done it for us. The second is those who catch me in a mistake. I hated that when I was young, but I find that in my "mature" years I've become almost suspiciously non-brittle. The reason it's gratifying is because then I learn something. And that's almost always an interesting moment in a class, and in a "conversation".
