[marnett]

I am all for using a more casual voice when writing about a subject for an audience outside of that particular domain of expertise. However, "Like, uh, their purpose." is grammatically and semantically meaningless. I am for using plain english to describe latin law terms. I am against colloquial, spoken styles slipping into written word.

[SolaceQuantum]

I don't belive this is actually semantically meaningless. The pause in 'uh' is clearly used to emphasize the significant lack of information such that scientists don't even know the purpose of these calls.

For brevity and that this is not a serious/academic article itself, the 'uh' is a suitable shorthand for a casual audience. I myself am not a fan but I do not claim it is semantically meaningless. I grasp the full meaning. I just don't agree with it.

[misterman0]

>> the pause in 'uh' is clearly used to emphasize the significant lack of information

Yes but it is a clumsy way of communicating that.

Also, a post shouldn't be down-voted just because you disagree with it. It should be down-voted because and only because of inappropriate behavior. There has been no inappropriate behavior. Karma police please withdraw.

[eindiran]

Paul Graham disagrees[0] and the current site guidelines[1] don't suggest that you shouldn't downvote for disagreement. The guidelines do suggest that you shouldn't comment on voting in the comments.

I agree with the position that downvoting for disagreement is a net negative for any site that allows it; it encourages the comments to become an echo chamber and discourages people from posting interesting opinions that dissent from the majority opinion. But HN's guidelines don't prohibit it or even suggest that its wrong.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[SolaceQuantum]

That it is clumsy is not the same as that it is semantically meaningless. My disagreement is that the statement is entirely incorrect.

[JasonFruit]

Its meaning is expressed by being spoken correctly, either in the imagination or out loud; as a poorly-specified representation of an expressive vocal sound, it's not meaningful in the same way that a real word would be. While it's not meaningless, it's certainly meaning-impoverished.

[littlekosh]

I’m curious as to your feelings on words such as bark, chirp, meow, splash, and mumble.

[JasonFruit]

I think you fail to grasp my meaning. The inflection of "uh" in that sentence is a greater part of its meaning than the pronunciation of the word, unlike the examples you gave. Onomatopoeia is a fine way to develop new words; inarticulate grunts that communicate hesitation in spoken conversation do not translate well to writing.

[sov]

> However, "Like, uh, their purpose." is grammatically and semantically meaningless

How can something be grammatically meaningless? Further, because you're not able to understand the semantic meaning of a phrase does not mean it has no semantic meaning. I don't understand German--is German semantically meaningless?

> I am all for using a more casual voice

> I am against colloquial, spoken styles slipping into written word

Are these not contrary to one another?

[marnett]

Removing the filler "uh" the sentence becomes "Like their purpose." Which could be semantically understood as "[I/He/They] Like (or enjoy) their (whale's song) purpose." A semantically ambiguous sentence is just that, ambiguous. This sentence can have multiple meanings.

Also, conflating dialects, verbal fillers, and languages is asinine and you know that is not what my original point was. Writing casually about an expert domain is like, uh, different than writing spoken word as written, ya know?

[sov]

> Removing the filler "uh" the sentence becomes "Like their purpose." Which could be semantically understood as "[I/He/They] Like (or enjoy) their (whale's song) purpose." A semantically ambiguous sentence is just that, ambiguous. This sentence can have multiple meanings.

Your argument supporting your prior assertion that "the sentence has meaningless grammar/syntax" is that... if you remove part if it, the sentence ceases to make sense?

Their sentence isn't semantically ambiguous. You may not understand the meaning of their sentence, but your experience is not everyone's experience. The word "uh" in the quoted sentence serves a particular purpose--it's an emphasis of the ridiculousness about how little we know with respect to the animals. Moreover, it's a very concise way of communicating that emphasis.

[mokus]

If anything, the fact that removing “uh” changes the interpretation is solid proof that it is not semantically empty.

[jacobush]

It adds emphasis. Translated: “Like, even their purpose!”

[robbrown451]

It isn't semantically meaningless.

Another way of conveying it might be this:

"For instance, they don't even know what their purpose is, which surprises this writer, given what an obvious and basic thing to know that would seem to be."

I'll admit their wording seems a bit overly casual, but it does convey things that simply saying "such as their purpose" would not, and it does it in fewer words than my example above.

[oska]

> However, "Like, uh, their purpose." is grammatically and semantically meaningless.

Compare to "Like, well, their purpose". I don't expect you'd have any problem with the word 'well' in that sentence but it serves pretty much the same semantic function as the 'uh'.

[airstrike]

I still have a problem with the word "Like" and with the full stop that's added for no particular reason

"Scientists still have a lot to understand about these songs, including their purpose" is a much better sentence.

The full stop in the article makes it sound like it's transcribing a speaker that didn't know what words to say next and made an unintentional pause. Or it's seeking to draw attention to how little scientists know in a rather flippant way. Like, totally disrespectful.

Maybe that's what resonates with the target readership, but for the rest of us it just sounds like a teenager, and I for one don't model my speech after teenagers

[echelon]

Um, that's like literally gate keeping, irregardless of what you think. Language is malleable.

[executesorder66]

> irregardless

> Language is malleable.

Assuming that wasn't an intentional joke:

Yes, language is malleable, and changes all the time. But I do not have an indifferent attitude towards it. I would like for languages to at least adhere to basic logic where they can. So I don't support stupid words or statements like "irregardless" or "I could care less". So I oppose them where I can.

If you are going to change a language, then improve it, don't degrade it.

[airstrike]

I think irregardless is a joke 99% of the time

[cfmcdonald]

What's wrong with gate keeping? Gates are useful things. Surely you agree that some writing is better than other writing? It's not all equally good.

[mikekchar]

I felt the same way when I first heard someone say "lol" out loud :-) What does that even mean? What is the world coming to if instead of actually laughing out loud you just say "lol"?

I really don't know. I read an interview with Haruki Murakami. He said that when he first started writing, he would write in English (which, at the time, he was very bad at) and then translate it into Japanese. He did that so that he was forced to write very simple sentences that anyone could understand. There is a reason is an insanely popular author.

People these days don't read literature, generally speaking. Actually, let's back that up. What I mean is that most people spend a lot more time reading than most people used to do 100, or 50 or even 20 years ago. However, they read tweets and facebook postings and instagram chats. They do it constantly. I've recently seen a guy riding a motorised scooter in the middle of Moorgate station while messaging on his mobile phone (with noise cancelling headphones on to boot)! This kind of writing is aimed at that guy!

Yeah, I hate that guy too (he almost killed me), but that's the market these days. They want close, intimate, personal text that looks like it might have come from their best friend. And while I'm being tongue in cheek, it's just true that modern society is getting less formal and more intimate. At the same time, people are reading vastly more content from non-professional writers than they are from professional writers. It changes what they look for and expect in an article.

I used to teach English as a foreign language. One of the things I realised very quickly is that the grammar rules you are taught in school are actually wrong. Those rules are called the "prescriptive grammar" for a language and they don't model the language perfectly.

A good example of this is use of "to be" with a participle. If I say "I am going", what is the meaning of the word "going"? How does it compare to "I am blue"? What if I said, "I am to go"? What do the words "to go" mean in this context? How does that compare to sentences like "Going is good" and "To go is good"? In all of these sentences, where is the verb? What if I told you that "to be" in all of these sentences is not a verb, but actually a "copula" -- a word that equates one thing to another. So "I am blue" just equates "I" and "blue". "I am going" equates "I" and the act of going. "I am to go" equates "I" and the necessity of going. "Going is good" equates an actual act of going with goodness. "To go is good" equates the general concept of going with goodness. But our prescriptive grammar says that we can't have a sentence without a verb and so "is going" is somehow a verb.

That grammar that we learn, is not the construction of the language. It is a set of normative rules that let us speak so that we don't sound unintelligible. However, prescriptive grammar always lags behind colloquial usage by necessity. Unlike French, we don't have an academy that tells us how we must talk. Instead, we talk how we want to talk and then we update our grammar to fit the weird rules that we started using when we were talking.

We don't write like we did in Shakespeare's time. We don't write like we did even 100 years ago. However, the change in writing form is morphing faster and faster these days because people are communicating more and more through writing. There is nothing that can be done about it.

Although, I hate it too. Because I'm old. LOL!

[furyofantares]

Nah, it’s expressive