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.
Comment on As an English language pedant, I find this text message mildly infuriating.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 week agoThe 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.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 week ago
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!
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.
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Sorry, it seems like I failed to acknowledge your point adequately. I cede fully the point about professionalism in this context, and agree that it isn’t up to snuff. I only hoped to stand up for the larger value of creativity and expressiveness of language in other contexts. I’m a fan of English, as I think you are too; to have a language as complex as ours is a high price, and I think it would be a shame not to enjoy the benefits. I know of no language more capable of shadings of connotation, and freedom of form, nor any so idiomatically rich.
Personally, I make a point to enjoy my language, and I don’t mind any newcomers getting things wrong here and there, as long as they manage to bring their own idiosyncratic creativity to it. Language is such a powerful tool that I feel the word itself has too mundane a connotation. I am obliged to write very boring emails for my work, and it is so stifling that I tend to spread my wings more in other contexts. If I seem defensive, it is because I do get complaints. I respectfully stand by it though, people should speak artfully more often - if artlessness in professional contexts is as much of a stylistic commandment as it seems to be, anyway.