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Comment by astral303 | Hacker News Reader

"Angry people demand; professionals “require.” "

YES YES YES--it's not enough to merely be aware of the connotations of your words. You must also be aware of any unintended information conveyed through their use.

For example, despite being synonyms, the use of the word "demand" in this context exposes one as an amateur. It doesn't matter if you think this is unfair. It matters that you know all information conveyed, directly or indirectly.

(This is incredibly good writing! Great business writing exhibits the characteristics of great code: as simple as possible but no simpler, and unambiguous. Reading this post is worth your time just for the chance to see an example of a relentlessly relevant post.)

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It might not be a formal difference, but here's something that I first noticed when reading the opinions of the Church Fathers when I was a grad student at Notre Dame.

They always wrote in a language suggesting that their opinions emanated solely from objective facts that were not of their own choice. "The law requires you to comply" is a statement of fact. "I want you to comply" sounds more like a personal feeling.

It may be that "require" expresses the former, and "demand" the latter.

Sorry, I know this is very minor and beside the point (ironic, given what you just said about relevance), but isn't that exactly what connotation means?

>a : the suggesting of a meaning by a word apart from the thing it explicitly names or describes⁰

Or is this perhaps even more meta than that - the choice itself can convey something apart from the semantics of a word, and this isn't something that the word connotation covers?

My apologies for sidetracking, you just got me wondering. I'm neither a native speaker nor a linguist, so it's tricky for me to think about these things sometimes. I agree with what you're saying, by the way.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/connotation

The word connotation is typically used to describe inferences that you'd make about a statement given the word used which are widely available to native speakers of that language. Thin, skinny, and gaunt all mean the same thing; only "gaunt" has the connotation that the person described necessarily has a problem.

The other poster is describing something a bit more meta than what the word connotation typically covers. They are describing something akin to a shibboleth, a great linguistics word. One's use of a shibboleth is an (often very quiet) signal of membership in an in-group. (c.f. usage #2 here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shibboleth )

An example: if someone steals your credit card, and you call your bank to report that, you could describe your requested action as either "opening a dispute" or "filing a chargeback." These are functionally equivalent but saying "chargeback" suggests that you're likely rather sophisticated about the mechanics of credit cards relative to most well-educated people.

Isn't this what semiotics[1] is all about? The difference between connotations and denotations?

My parents were really into that sort of thing "Words have power" - So during my 'bratty teenager' phase, I standardized on the word with the most negative denotation that had the correct connotation in my speech. I still do it sometimes, as a joke, but it's... funny, because while I have the feeling that the connotation is somehow less important than the denotation, and when I do the above, I'm attempting to point that out, nobody else seems to see it that way. To 'hire someone profitably' is a dramatically different thing, in most minds, than to 'exploit someone', even though the two words have an identical denotation.

I used to see my lack of understanding here as a sign of how most people cannot see past their own emotions; I now see my lack of understanding as a sign of how I am not in touch with emotions in a fully human sort of way.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

Connotations are not meaningless. It's a question of redundancy when encoding information and should be treated like a checksum.

What you say might be true, but it isn't covered by Google's denotational definitional of the word connotation:

connotation - 'an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.'

That seems to also cover whatever meta- preferences that a particular word choice may signal.

Funnily enough, we're now in the realm of debating the connotation vs. denotation of the word 'connotation' itself.

Yes, your meta interpretation is what I was getting at.

Also, will vs. shall.

The defendant will comply by...

vs.

The defendant shall comply by...

When in doubt, use the latter.

There are occasions where legally a "demand" is exactly what you need; e.g. A "formal demand notice" is a specific type of notice that a debtor is required to pay up immediately (i.e. 7 or 14 days) before a creditor files for involuntary bankruptcy (i.e. to force you into bankruptcy). Having said that you should never say "I demand" or "I require", it is always used to reference a document, a signed contract, a law, etc.

Small claims court goes with demand verbiage oddly enough in some states. So context matters.

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