"Technically, that's not true"

Valid normal English usage that differs from technical vocabulary, a higher form of pedentry

Often the same normal English word has one (or more) specific technical uses. Either because the technical term came first, and was adopted for analogous (but not necessarily identical) lay uses. Or, at least as commonly, because the English (or other vernacular) word came first, and it was adopted for technical use (for instance, in maths the meaning of "circle" is more specific than the English use, but no adult, not even the most proprietary maladjusted mathematician objects to the normal English use).

In the rare specific case where previously the technical term was the only usage, and it had a specific meaning, which is distorted by how some people use it, then I think people used to the technical term are correct to request it be used correctly. Obviously language evolves naturally, and it's normally best to accept how it does so, but it's also correct to participate in the change, and sometimes to make value judgements. For instance, "light-year" means "the distance light travels in a year in a vacuum[1]". Some people use it to mean "a really long time". Even if this is understandable and comprehensible, I think it's fair to say that it's wrong, and language is more useful and more clear if we DON'T do this.

However, in most of the other cases, when the lay use is a normal part of English, and especially where the lay use of the word came first, I don't think people have any justification whatsoever for insisting only the technical definition is correct.

Some people are surprised that I think this. "You're pedantic" they say, "surely you approve of all strict rules[2], correct or not?" Well, no. I don't. Firstly, pedantry is not, actually, the highest calling in my life :) Secondly, denying that circle does (and should) have a normal English usage is incorrect -- and the one thing that death to successful pedantry is being incorrect. Appreciating a complex, intricate and subtle interaction of different and sometimes implicit rules of different meanings, and applying them ALL correctly is a HIGHER form of pedantry.

[1] Although the official definition may vary depending which of the units we have defined fundamentally, I think this is the _core_ meaning, and people care correct to use it that way whichever of time, distance, and speed units are not fundamental.

[2] The lust for rules

I was somewhat glib about people always wanting to find underlying rules. In fact, it's a very human tendency. People -- from all walks of life -- are prone to seizing on some distinction and assuming it's "correct".

This urge is very natural, and very healthy insofar as it lets us form useful generalisations.

However, it has the unfortunate side-effect of making us insist there are rules where there aren't.

People insist that momentous happenings (eg. assassinations) must have complicated causes, not just chance.

People want to believe that there is an international committee that decides how the number of horse's legs touching the ground in a statue relates to the manner of death of the rider. They believe it so strongly they're shocked to see statues that don't follow it.

People want to assume that "E. E. Cummings" should be lowercased because he lowercased many other things but (if I recall my information correctly) he didn't lowercase his name.

People want to assume that you should not split an infinitive. People can become very hostile on this point, because they feel it's the primary bastion in the skirmish for correctness. People have been very very hostile to startrek for saying "to boldly go". I'm sure startrek didn't think it through very far. But as it happens, there is no benefit to society to avoiding splitting infinitives (except a very crude sort of exclusionary test to give people arbitrary hoops to see who learns them best), and while some educated people say not to, the people who know the most about it (copyeditors and linguists) approve it.

I do it myself. When I first learnt that a fox was a "vulpes" and a cube was a "cuboid", I insisted on the technical meaning so hard I effectively denied that "fox" and "cube" were equally correct descriptions. However, in my defence, I was about eight. It's good insofar as it represents learning, but bad insofar as it's taken as a universal truth.

So inferring rules is natural. It's just that sometimes it's wrong even though it's natural.

"Technically, that's not true"

But what really gets me is when someone applies "technically" to a sentence which contains no technical definitions of words. If I use "A or B" in the normal English meaning[1], and someone says "technically that means only A or B, but not both", then they're WRONG because they incorrectly assumed people use logical-or when actually they use normal-English-or. But at least their sentence has specific (even if false) meaning.

But sometimes people prepend "technical" to a sentence to make a distinction that is -- as far as I can tell -- completely non-existent. And it annoys me because I can't see how it can EVER be correct.

[1] which is inclusive or exclusive depending on context

When to cling to outdated rules

Many of us grow up with some rules, that then become possibly outdated. When is it better to stick with them, and when is it better to abandon them?

1. If you don't have time to think about it now you've absorbed the habit, and it's not obviously harmful, just keep ignoring it.

2. If it DOES take time, or it COULD be harmful, or if it increasingly generates friction with other people who have the opposite instinct, it may be worth considering if it's still valid or not and making a positive distinction to stick with the rule, or abandon it.

I find it satisfying to decide, and lose a nagging sense that I'm "not quite doing the right thing" whatever I do. For instance, IIRC, two friends had a disagreement about whether lightbulbs on dimmer switches still drew maximum power when they were dimmed (or maybe it was whether to turn the light off when they left the room, or something else). But rather than go on nagging each other and attributing the different habits to intransigence rather than the same lingering sense of obligation to a different internalised rule, they looked up the answer. (IIRC, dimmer switches used to waste the energy, now they don't.)

3. Does it provide a small potential benefit? Then you might as well keep it.

If you always do small to medium arithmetic problems in your head, then it's probably worth keeping the habit, because sometimes it's useful, and if you're good at it, it's equally reliable to using a calculator (just with different sorts of errors).

If you don't, it's probably not worth learning. Everyone would benefit from being able to do "6x7", or "20% of $150" or "to the nearest hundred, what's 27*54" in their head. But the benefits of calculating "67*43" or "345/72 to 2dp" are small. It's easy to learn, and learning it is nice, but it's probably not actually going to save you much time if you normally have a computer handy.

4. Does it provide an illusory benefit that's likely to make you keep the rule even at the expense of clarity? This is the difficult one, but it's best to let the rule go.

In the old days, computers did integer arithmetic much faster than floating point arithmetic. Now, on a modern computer, this isn't really true. Using integers is often somewhat useful, because you can make sure if you have precise answers, but if what you really mean is floating point numbers, you should understand and use floating point numbers.

Now, software engineers are having similar introspection about more modern rules. For instance, most people still keep to rules of thumb that may be invalid when computers have large memory caches.

The difficulty is deciding whether the benefit is real or not. If you have a lot of effort invested in something, it's always tempting to think the rule is a benefit, even if a small one. And the knowledge is always good, even if not immediately useful. But sometimes you need to decide if you should keep going it or not.

Controversially, I think think this category includes mixing greek and latin roots. What benefit does this provide? The benefit is that if there are people in Britain who speak ancient greek or latin, but don't even know the common English-adopted prefixes of the other, they can understand some non-mixed words. But there are no such people. It's still somewhat elegant to keep the borrowings separate, because it compartmentalises words, which is NEATER whether or not it's ever used. But this has to be balanced against the benefits of mixing roots, which is that it often gives useful words. Now, while I appreciate both benefits, I think the usefulness of words like "television" definitely outweighs the other.

It's possible there's some other benefit to keeping the old rule, but if you want to say that, I think you have to know what it is. I think it's no longer enough to simply say "it's correct" or "it's normal", or "arbitrary rules are good because they let us measure people's progress in learning" you have to make a positive decision of what you are gaining.