Comment on As an English language pedant, I find this text message mildly infuriating.

• Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I know, just toying with the metaphor of a clogged drain.

  I used to be a bit of a scold about grammar and spelling myself. A lack of style bothers me more nowadays. Everyone should feel welcome to play with our language. It doesn’t take a logodaedalus to construct an unglued apothegm, and we are all the richer for it; I am more disappointed by those who don’t try.

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The problem is that language is meant to facilitate communication, not a toy to be played around with. This sort of thing does nothing to help people who speak English as a second language. It just confuses them more.

    In this case, the message came from the medical group my former doctor is a part of. Sure, this particular case is pretty harmless (just mildly infuriating), but just fucking around with language for fun in such settings sounds like a terrible idea to me.

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    • Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      It’s unprofessional in that context for sure, and it ticks the “mildly infuriating” box. But, at the risk of giving any unintended offense, I have to take issue with the idea of language purely as a tool. It’s our culture, and language is every bit as much an art as it is a tool. Poetry, rhetoric, humour, all of fiction and important aspects of the rest of literature - these are not mere data, they are language as art, freighted with cultural significance. Even if we were to invent a means of communicating telepathically without language as an intermediary, art and playfulness is an intrinsic element of communication. There is no message from one mind to another that cannot be made worse by artlessness or numbness of feeling. And I sincerely hope I was able to make the point artfully!

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      • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        In a professional setting, language should not be an art, it should be something to facilitate communication.

        We are not talking about poetry or fiction or anything else here and I think that should be obvious. Do you really think someone living in an English-speaking country for the first time and only are semi-fluent should be getting poems from their doctor or their boss and should be expected to figure out what they mean? I hope not.

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    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      You would have a point if they had said "to unstop texts from this number, reply with “start”.

      But they didn’t.

      They quoted the word and explicitly defined the meaning they assigned to it. There is no ambiguity.

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