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".
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...
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.
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.
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].
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.
“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)?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
Is Pluto a planet? IAUs definition of planet is just another "improper noun"; common word that has been afterwards enshrined with a technical definition.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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".
> 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Ah, I misunderstood your comment, sorry. Actually, there are plenty, like italics or hyperlinks. Maybe the complaint is that they're not as common or not grammatically "required".
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".
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".)
> 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
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.
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.
97 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] thread'that for once in your miserable excuse for an existence you have finally used the word "semantics" correctly.'
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".
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.
Human languages are imprecise; communication is often difficult.
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.
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
“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!
‹ducks and runs away to enjoy the fallout from a safe distance›
(Maybe I'm missing a jokey reference or something?)
Not that this adds that much, but it’s a very weird omission.
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.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-Intelligent/dp/...
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.
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.
> 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...
This is why we need Lojban.
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.
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.
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]
[0] : https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/red+herring+principle[1] : https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/red+herring+principle#examples
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.
1: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4398258/
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.
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.
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".
> 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".
> 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.
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!)
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
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".)
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
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.
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.