Non-standard adjectives
Apr. 20th, 2015 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackhttp://blog.plover.com/math/partial-function.html
Mark Dominus said, Ranjit Bhatnagar proposed the notion of "non-standard adjectives". I'm sure I talked about this before, but I can't find the link.
The idea is, that a "big diamond" is a sort of diamond. But a "fake diamond" is not a diamond -- it's something like a diamond, but isn't. Likewise, something which is "definitely complete" is complete, but something which is "partially complete" is not complete. The adjective describes a way the noun applies other than usual.
An example that came up recently was "nearly unique". I still stand by "very unique" for the normal English meaning of "unique in more ways, or out of a bigger set" (I agree it's meaningless if the set in which it's unique is specified, but that's really rare in normal language rather than maths). But I said that "nearly unique" should be acceptable to everyone, in that it means something that isn't unique, but is close to it.
However, I've a feeling I said something recently that came across as wrong, or misleading, or hurtful, and I wanted to quite this explanation to say that that's not what I meant, but I can't remember what it was. Sorry :(
Mark Dominus said, Ranjit Bhatnagar proposed the notion of "non-standard adjectives". I'm sure I talked about this before, but I can't find the link.
The idea is, that a "big diamond" is a sort of diamond. But a "fake diamond" is not a diamond -- it's something like a diamond, but isn't. Likewise, something which is "definitely complete" is complete, but something which is "partially complete" is not complete. The adjective describes a way the noun applies other than usual.
An example that came up recently was "nearly unique". I still stand by "very unique" for the normal English meaning of "unique in more ways, or out of a bigger set" (I agree it's meaningless if the set in which it's unique is specified, but that's really rare in normal language rather than maths). But I said that "nearly unique" should be acceptable to everyone, in that it means something that isn't unique, but is close to it.
However, I've a feeling I said something recently that came across as wrong, or misleading, or hurtful, and I wanted to quite this explanation to say that that's not what I meant, but I can't remember what it was. Sorry :(