February 05, 2011, 22:09
KallehLinguistic Vagueness
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.
February 06, 2011, 05:12
zmježdIt's hard to tell. I think it means that the woman was talking but not saying a whole lot. And, that it was a newish phenomenon and somehow the twentieth century was to blame: probably TV and the Web.
February 06, 2011, 06:21
GeoffHard to tell? You're not trying to be vague, are you, Z?
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!
February 06, 2011, 07:01
zmježdNope, not me. Anyway, it dawns on me that there is only linguistic vagueness, so slash the qualifier.
Linguistic vagueness, somehow suggests that there are other types of vagueness. What are they? Maybe
linguistic is used here in its usual pejorative sense. Again, vagueness, and content-free utterances, have nothing to do with grammar. You can have perfectly grammatical nonsensical texts. Academic writing abounds in them. That's why I contend that there is nothing grammatically wrong with the
more unique construction. If there is a problem with it, it is one of logic and not grammar. Though, one understands (sans peevish blinders) immediately that any point on the continuum of any qualifier may be surpassed.
February 06, 2011, 15:18
KallehDid the pdf I linked to (through Google) not work for you, goofy? It was different from the ones you linked to.
I am thinking this concept is more complex than just being vague utterances, but I can't put my finger on how.
For the record, I didn't link it to grammar....only to linguistics. I know better than to mention grammar around here.
February 06, 2011, 15:29
<Proofreader>Seems to me like someone unable to formulate coherent sentences.
February 13, 2011, 19:38
wordmaticI vaguely feel as if I know what it means....but I can't quite put my finger on it.
WM