In the Chicago Tribune there was a summary of an article by Clark Whelton in the City
Journal (?), which was titled, "What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness." Clever title, though not original as I found it all over the Web.
I wasn't able to access that particular article. However, here is what the summary said:
quote:
I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. "And he was like, you know, 'Helloooo, what are you looking at?' and stuff, and I'm like, you know, 'Can I, like, pick you up?,' and he goes, like, 'Brrrp brrrp brrrp,' and I'm like, you know, 'Whoa, that is so wow!" She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.
Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late 20th century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-40s, old enough to have been an earlier carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.
For Wordcrafters, we've certainly talked about this kind of thing before. However, I hadn't heard the term "linguistic vaguenss" before and thought it was just something the author had come up with. However, I see that it's a major topic in linguistics, at least from what I can find on Google. Here is a scholarly article on it:
Link (4th link down; pdf written by Robert van Rooij.)
So, my question is, what exactly is "linguistic vagueness?" It can't be so simple as to just mean not being precise, can it? With a 57-page scholarly paper on it, with 85 references, I've got to think there's more to it.
I remember irrelevant simile being used in the 1950s-1960s when I was a teenager. I was seldom guilty of it myself, of course. I blame it on the Beat Poets! 
