Improper Nouns

“Freedom of speech” might be a good example of one. It is a shortcut for a certain concept that is fairly expansive, and not without ambiguities of its own. Now it’s common to see it deconstructed into constituent words, and a sum of their meanings (selected by the communicator) used to give the phrase a new meaning that suits current communication goals the most.

Occasionally one party may use the resulting mismatch in meaning to blame the other for duplicity: how dare they say our country has free speech (1) whereas what it has isn’t even close to free speech (2)?

Semantics is fun!

I believe that this confusion is strongest for native speakers. When you learn a language as a secondary language, you get used to pattern-match phrases in the new language. At first, each phrase is just a combination of words that you have to learn what they mean, one by one. After a while, you start to see the connection between phrases and their words, but you still retain that ability to simply pattern-match phrases and assign an arbitrary meaning to them. As a native speaker, it is much easier to interpret the colloquial meaning and you may have to almost force yourself to pattern-match the non-colloquial meaning.

I would also think that there are several subjects of study that may be helpful in interpreting these improper nouns:

* Mathematics. You soon get used to the style of thinking that starts with an assumption and proceeds to reason around the assumption, without defining exactly what the assumption is. "Assume we have a number, i, that satisfies i^2 = -1", and so on. It is straightforward to extend this type of thinking to improper nouns.

* Programming. In programming, we just define things, such as variable names or classes, and then we use them. The same thinking can be applied to improper nouns.

* Law. In contracts and agreements, is important to have precise meaning of every term, so contracts often start by explicitly defining all terms used in the contract. This type of thinking is easy to extend to improper nouns.

The Greenscreen - of course - is actually blue :).

BTW non-English-speaking teams have a slight advantage here. Technical terms and proper nouns in English are used in English, while everything else (for example - referring to a screen that's actually green) is done in our native language, so there's no misunderstanding.

This is why scientific names for species are useful. Too bad that practice isn’t used more in other sciences.

More about the problems with surveys: https://carcinisation.com/2020/12/11/survey-chicken/

For the German speakers: "Käsekuchen" (literally "cheesecake") in Germany, Poland and other countries of the region uses Quark, which is untranslateable, but is texture-wise somewhere between light cream cheese and pressed Greek Yogurt. It's not usually referred to as a cheese within Germany any more. So Käsekuchen is a sweet cake that goes well with red jam and fresh cream, or served with coffee.

Käsekuchen in Switzerland (again, "cheesecake") is a pie with a filling based on cream and grated hard cheese. If you want the sweet German cake, you have to order "Cheesecake" (using the English word!), not "Käsekuchen".

People can be obtuse to show off insider knowledge. Readers can find stuff for which they weren't the intended audience (which is very common post Internet). However, it is important that it seems like even when there's a complete lack of context around the improper noun, our brains are good at understanding that the phrase might mean something else, and we can choose to look it up or not be bothered. I'm not sure if any more signifier is needed. Writers might not even know they're using an improper noun, afterall.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-Intelligent/dp/...

It’s true that there’s a downside to using regular words for technical terms, and the problem isn’t the regular words so much as the fact that people, all of us, love making assumptions, and we love demanding that words must meet a single literal interpretation exactly and completely. But something I’ve always thought is fascinating about Latin (edit: or Greek) technical terms is that for Latin speakers, they were regular words. Some of the Latin terms we think of as technical in English are even ridiculously generic in Latin. This using of regular words for jargon has always been there, it’s not something new. It would be interesting to know if Rome had the same issue with these ‘improper nouns’.

I love the call to attention though; recognizing that people might be saying something different than what you think is incredibly useful. Realizing that my reactionary incredulity is actually me misunderstanding the words because I know less about the subject than the other person, that keeps me from making an ass of myself often. Not always, but often. :P

In my past experience I’ve found that there is an indicator amongst some (trained?) writers of English, which is single quotes:

- Go to the ‘green’ building

(this reads as: it’s not literally green, it’s green in some metaphorical sense like their colour coding system)

- He thinks that ‘improper nouns’ don’t carry a stylistic indicator

(look I even did it above!)

At a conference, Effective Altruism Global 2016, on the Berkeley campus, they kept referring to (what I parsed as) the "poly room", which I assumed was a room sponsored/organized by the polyamory community (which has a non-trivial overlap with EA).

Only later did I realize they were saying the Pauley room, which (like Green above) came from the donors' surnames.

The thing is, I try to be super vigilant about ambiguous parsings. If there's a board game called "Five", I would never induce confusion by asking "Do you have Five?" instead saying, "Do you have the board game Five?" If I went to MIT and were taking to an outsider, I would probably refer to it as the "Ida Green" or "Cecil Green" building.

(Side note: At Texas A&M, they warn you that if someone refers to the "coldest buliding", you probably misheard them saying "the Koldus building".)

These Improper Nouns are quite descriptive and therefore help people who are picking up a field. The diagnosis "Persistent depressive disorder" is, I think, a better name than "Green's Disorder" (presuming the diagnosis was introduced by someone called Green). Once you know an improper noun is an improper noun, and you know the context in which it was coined, then all of a sudden, it becomes much clearer than if it was truly a proper noun.

I think, accidentally, the old tendency of naming things in latin or ancient greek had the effect of marking things as Improper Nouns whilst still allowing people who understand those languages to get the description. Similarly, the "Persistent depressive disorder" name has some marker of being an improper noun: the noun 'disorder'. In that sense the Green building, or a highly sensitive person, are much worse examples. Because they contain no hint of being improper nouns.

Perhaps this 'marker' approach is a nice solution. Coin a whole set of nouns such as disorder, theorem, etc (examples feel hard to come by). Then use improper nouns as this 'base-noun' with a whole bunch of descriptive adjectives. Then any use of the base-noun marks it as part of an improper noun. Within this idea, I think we would need a base-noun for the concept of 'an organization that meets some legal definition'. Similar base-nouns for other things meeting legal definitions might be needed. If I were to dream perhaps you could give a normal noun some suffix to designate that it is not a X, but an X meeting a specific legal definition. If the suffix were -lex then the example of "certified community behavioral health clinic" would become a "certified community behavioral health cliniclex".

'that for once in your miserable excuse for an existence you have finally used the word "semantics" correctly.'

But to contribute in a useful way to the conversation or the actions involved, you would need that culture already to some extent.

-If you are so unfamiliar with psychology research that your intuition doesn't tell you that Highly Sensitive People might be a category coined by the researcher, you are unlikely to be able to add to the research without getting up to speed with that culture in the process.

-If your intuition doesn't tell you that repeated expressions in medical insurance probably have specific contractual definitions, you probably need outside help with the insurance discussion as soon as possible anyway.

- If you can't come to the conclusion that community centers or whatever implies specific local laws and politics, you would need to delve into those local politics anyway before acting or contributing productively following the content of the article

The Green/green building example makes sense to some extent, but I also cannot help but feel that it is a failure of intuition as well, or at least a failure of experience in human communication. You would hear green building and probably assume there's information missing because you know colors can be very vague and subjective, or the fact that you know to some extent how colleges work and how internal culture is strong in those places would prompt you to assume it is a proper or improper noun on the spot.

> I expect some of you, confronted with these examples, are getting pissed off that improper nouns are even a thing. For what it's worth, it pisses me off too. I don't think it's deliberate deceptiveness, but I do think it's the rhetorical equivalent of negligent malpractice. It's a pattern of language usage which casts more shadow than light, and, as far as I can tell, has absolutely no upside unless you can find some benefit to causing misunderstanding and confusion.

I think something that causes technical improper nouns to form, is that the common reading and understanding of the phrase is actually imprecise or ambiguous. A field finds the concept useful, and then tries paring down the ambiguity and imprecision to make it even more useful, while also trying to keep -some- form of conciseness, and now you have an improper noun.

The tension is between replacing every instance of "preventative care" with "federally mandated fully insured care".

For example "Part 314 preventative care" (authority made up).

The most common and most innocent way these arise is that when some source, rule, process, or law refines or clarifies a definition for good and proper reasons, then people go around using the definition divorced from that context.

Even if you don't know and can't find or don't want to be bothered to look up the authority, you can still indicate the improper noun use by saying "insurance jargon preventative care" or even just putting it in quote: "preventative care".

This doesn't help if you're participating in jargon and don't know it, but in many (most?) cases the authors of confusing text do know it-- it's their own industries/groups jargon after all.

Some people view racism as "prejudice + power". This comes from academia and is an example of an improper noun from the article, but has found its way outside of it through, I'll paraphrase - Twitter SJWs.

Then, you have the traditional colloquial definition of racism, which is just "disliking someone because of their skin color".

Then, you have an expansion on the colloquial definition, which brings all sorts of other traits under the umbrella of racism, where basically any kind of xenophobia may be referred to as racism.

I think we have 3 very common beliefs about the definition of racism floating around in America, which is a shame since it is such a focal point of half the conversations in America, and the people talking to each other probably have different internal definitions of this word.

EDIT: Another great example of the dynamic on HN. One time I expressed skepticism that airlines could rearrange seats in a particular way because they were constrained in how they could reconfigure the layout, and would need special permission for a new configuration.

The topic experts were happy to roll their eyes and lecture me that "the FAA doesn't regulate configurations" but didn't seem to notice that there might be ambiguity in what is being referred to by a "configuration", and so could have clarified what kinds of changes are vs aren't permitted in a way that sidesteps the jargon.

Instead, they just assumed a) I was using the term correctly, and b) I was making an obviously wrong statement under that correct definition. This then let them conclude c) the only reason I would persist in being skeptical is because I automatically refuse to listen to experts.

The right approach would have been to 1) identify how the word "configuration" is used in this domain and how it might differ from the lay meaning of that term, and 2) use one's domain expertise to give detail ("color") on what the boundary is between changes that do vs. don't need approval, and why the airline's plan would fall squarely in the latter.

That would have made it a clarifying, enlightening experience for all readers, rather than a game of "I'm high status, you're not".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665250

This is why we need Lojban.

I fully agree with the author, on the importance of being aware they exist. The insure example is apt, and people also get tripped by law and contracts wording that refer to specific concepts which are barely related to the word used.

Or least favorite ones. The ones I get the most frustrated about people misunderstanding.

"set of measure zero"

"Saddle point"

"Ladder operator"

"Top of tree"

"Nested loops"

"A star search" ;)

Not that this adds that much, but it’s a very weird omission.

> Call them improper nouns. It's like a stealth proper noun: like a proper noun phrase, it designates, without describing, but it sure looks like it's just garden-variety description.It has none of the ordinary indications that proper nouns do that twig us it is designating without describing. Proper nouns, for instance, are designated with capital letters. In real-world MIT, the confusion fostered by the name of the Green Building is strictly an aural artifact. There's no confusion that the Green Building is not merely a green building in writing. Of course, we have no capital letters in spoken English, so there's ambiguity aloud. In our hypothetical color-coded MIT, that ambiguity persists in writing, because "the green building" is not just not a building that is physically green, but not capitalized either: it's an improper noun.

I can understand this part. Improper Noun is not a grammatical error, but the designation of a word that purely designates as a word that describes.

> First, over on Reddit's r/science, somebody posted an article about research into the "highly sensitive person". A lot of commenters were very upset and bewildered by what they took the research to be saying about people who were particularly "sensitive", in some sense or another.

The problem here is that "highly sensitive person" doesn't just refer to people who are sensitive. Perhaps it should be in initial capitals, as a proper proper noun – "Highly Sensitive Person" – but in the popular press article, it wasn't. It's a psychological construct proposed by psychologist Elaine Aron. It is a technical term, with a technical definition and criteria. It is, in other words, an improper noun. The findings do not concern sensitivity per se, they concern people who meet the criteria for this psychological construct designated, non-obviously, by the improper noun "highly sensitive person".

One commenter angrily asked why would a researcher assume someone who is very easily annoyed by subtle physical sensations would also be prone to emotional rejection sensitivity. The answer is simple: the researcher didn't assume that. That's definitional to Aron's HSP construct. If you don't have both, you don't meet the criteria. Highly Sensitive People aren't just highly sensitive people, they're people who meet sufficient criteria for the Highly Sensitive People construct.

But I don’t understand this example. First, it’s most probably because I haven’t read anything about Highly Sensitive Person before, so everything I say next is 99% BS.

Second, in this case, the jargonification or technicalisation of the word ‘sensitive’ have meanings that overlap with the non-technical ‘sensitive’. It’s an improper Improper Noun: both ‘sensitive’ describe something similar, but the technical version has expanded the word to mean beyond the common knowledge, yet it still retains its HSP construct’s designatory power. It’s still a common noun, a noun that describes; maybe call it a Noble Noun, seeing how high and mighty it seems to be from the Common Noun.

Very interesting read, nonetheless.

They're using "bivalent" improperly. Maybe they mean "bipolar".

Improper Adjectives, if you will.

I think that if you're going to project that you're a grammar expert, you want to temper your communication with a certain amount of humility, lest you err.