Hacker News Reader

Comment by dadie | Hacker News Reader

Beware though that only learning words may leave you confused as in my experience Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references.

For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors.

It always made me question if Americans in contrast to the British are a bit afraid to be precise.

View on HN

> Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references.

This is not specific to "Americans". Learn any language and you will have the same impression, and experience the same gulf between textbook usage and everyday usage.

As a non-native speaker, English does have (what I think is) a rather unique phenomenon where the same verb can be used to express different shades of meaning (or sometimes wildly different meanings) depending on whether or which proposition is attached to it. "To step" means to take a step, but "to step up" means to confront something. When you "talk to" someone you converse with them, and when you "talk at" someone you monologue at them.

English uses a lot of prepositional phrase idioms. Now that I'm learning Japanese, I find there are relatively few like that (although not zero, compare "と相談" to discuss with and に相談" to consult). But it instead uses many, many compound verb expressions that are often not intiutive to a learner and just have to be memorized, so the effect is similar.

It also has words with opposite meanings like 断る (kotowaru, to reject, to ask permission), and 適当 (tekitou, suitable, appropriate, half-assed, careless).

Thanks. I'm learning Japanese too. The other day I learned that 在る can be used with either で or に and didn't make this connection, though I guess whether it counts as different meanings depends on how you look at it, since in both cases you're specifying the position in spacetime of something.

> [Japanese] also has words with opposite meanings

These are known as contronyms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contronym).

Thank you! It's funny how I have never thought of most of these. The only similar word I could think of was "biweekly".

This is a feature among the Germanic languages (of which English is one).

In German, these are called splittable verbs, and they can appear in two forms: "upstep" and "step up," depending on the sentence structure. That makes "upstep" / "step up" seem more like a separate verb from "step," rather than just being the same verb with an adverb added on.

My German teachers translated "trennbare Verben" as "separable verbs":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb

These are called phrasal verbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phrasal_verbs

Interesting perspective, I'm used to seeing the exact opposite observation, that British people are famous for saying things meant as insults that sound positive at a surface level and that people are often unsure if they're being mocked/ridiculed or not.

Of course, American corporate-speak is unique from normal conversations, and people intentionally use vagueness to make sure there's general agreement before saying something concretely that might be contentious or cause problems.

Different context. One social register is extreme understatement, which may be laden with passive aggression, but could also be approving. "That's not a bad idea" is likely to mean "Good idea, let's do it, or at least consider it seriously." But "Interesting idea" is likely to mean "You're an idiot."

This is more corporate/middle class.

There's also a working class register which is very direct and sweary, and extreme insults are actually meant affectionately.

Even more confusingly, the two can overlap, and the same people will switch between them - sometimes in the same setting - with relative equals.

Americans don't seem to do understatement. "My business died" becomes "My incredible journey." Relationships are cross-bred with hustle, so you can be friends with someone and they'll ask you to invest in their MLM scheme.

Instead of using understatement US corporate speaks uses noise to act out hierarchy, to gaslight and to misdirect.

I was talking to someone today who was asked to produce a report. They sent it on time, and then the team lead called a meeting to ask why it hadn't arrived.

The report was literally sitting in their inbox unread. Everyone could see it, but they all went through the motions of pretending it wasn't there and developing an action plan for future delivery.

It's all very David Graeber. So far as I can tell the US seems to specialise in situations where corporate insanity is happening but the sharp edges have been filed off, so it looks like productive activity higher up the pyramid.

> They sent it on time, and then the team lead called a meeting to ask why it hadn't arrived. The report was literally sitting in their inbox unread. Everyone could see it, but they all went through the motions of pretending it wasn't there and developing an action plan for future delivery.

That is surreal.

> Americans don't seem to do understatement.

Brits say this all the time because they assume we talk like people in movies and interviews do (or they interpret corporate-speak as how Americans actually talk). We use understatement plenty. In fact, the "interesting idea" understatement? I wouldn't even clock it as British because we use that in the US, too. I would say it is a classic example we use here of how you politely call an idea stupid. "Hm, interesting." We don't usually say "that's a stupid idea." That would be extremely rude.

I encounter this same attitude vis a vis Brits and sarcasm. "Oh, Americans don't get sarcasm." We absolutely do get sarcasm (insert claim Brits are being sarcastic when they say we don't get it). Britain is not special in this regard. It boggles the mind why Brits think we don't understand it. The languages are not so far gone.

I tell ya what, "understatement of the year" was not a phrase coined to describe something a Brit said.

You also find observers outside the Anglosphere describing understatement not as a British thing, but an anglophonic thing, including in American speech. https://www.identitytheory.com/anna-wierzbickas-english-mean...

I would go so far as to say that the hedges famous to American English opinion sharing is an example of understatement. "I feel like XYZ" is an Americanism, and it's understatement to the point of re-catorizing a fact as an opinion in order to soften your speech.

I can't tell you the number of times I've heard a Texan describe extremely hot weather as "a bit warm."

Examples abound.

(We also bust balls with our friends, and it lines up with class the same way you describe, including code switching between two registers.)

Code switching between registers is a fact of life in America. Nobody speaks corporate natively, and it's more extreme if you grow up or live in an ethnic minority enclave.

What Americans tend to not "get" is how dry British humor can be. It's less about not getting sarcasm and more just not finding it as funny. Personally, I blame the number of ads that interrupt our TV shows back when people watched broadcast and cable TV. There really wasn't enough time to build up and the ads are too loud and shouty in comparison.

I think that it's often true that Americans don't get British sarcasm. And it's similarly often true that British people don't get American sarcasm.

Seems like an extremely reductive and negative take on what is "American". Perhaps you've only experienced America via LinkedIn and a specific shitty company?

>Interesting perspective

I see what you did there!

Here is British comedian David Mitchell complaining about the same kind of vagueness in British corporate culture.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=67QsrpNH96Q

When I started dating someone whose second language was English, I found that the idioms were a giant hurdle. We really do speak in idioms and metaphors and this makes it very difficult for people who understand the words but not the cultural context. While my (now spouse) adapted, I also adapted by learning how to speak far more literally, especially around people of mixed levels of English.

I don't think there is a fear of being imprecise. If anything, it is a fear of speaking plainly as boring.

In your experience, would you say that your communication has become more precise?

Reflecting on it now, I believe that metaphors and idioms can help a lot for communicating intuitively and they can convey a lot of information. But at the same time in the situations where a idiom isn't understood by the other, I often have to take a moment to extract the essence of its meaning.

I don't think my communication became more precise. Language is imprecise and in these cases (ESL), you are also limiting your vocabulary. (Especially when I moved outside the US - while I was around very educated people who studied for the GRE, learning a word is not the same as digesting all connotations.

So in social communication, you aren't getting more precise -- in many cases, you're getting less precise and taking more words to handle that. Consider the idiom "shit or get off the pot." You can say that "Make a decision" is less precise. "Do it or don't" is also an idiom but doesn't express the frustration that the vulgarity does. "I am frustrated and need you to either take action or shut up" is more direct and possibly more offensive because it takes formality.

And then there's the prefix of "Sometimes you need to" that turns it from a command to advice. "Sometimes you need to either take action or stop complaining" sounds like the emphasis is on "you" instead of the predicate as if it's a critique of the person, whereas the idiom gives more of a proverb connotation.

The problem is that language carries many layers and "more precise" is a goal in technical communication but neglects the other layers.

> For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors.

First, most native English speakers have an execrable vocabulary. I seem to remember that most people use less than 2000 (generally much less) unique words when they talk to each other. There is a high probability that they simply don't know the right word.

Second, using the same word over and over again gets monotonous. Using colorful idioms and metaphors is often necessary to keep people's attention. This is triply true in this day and age of mayfly-like attention spans.

Finally, if I'm teaching something, I'm probably trying to give you 3 or 4 different ways to think about the subject in the hope that one of them resonates and clicks so you understand. I don't know a priori which one that will be, so my vocabulary needs to shift in the hope of getting the point across.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Sokath! His eyes uncovered!

I always hear a phase that goes like “we have a word for it in Language, …”. You almost never hear it said where English is that language. We just don’t have many words or don’t like adding new ones very frequently, it seems.

English tends to just borrow/steal words from other languages if they're useful enough. It could also be something to do with the lack of consistency of english rules so it's not so easy to create new words.

You can wordificate cromulent lexemes with abandon. The English language don't care.

any noun can become a verb if you don’t care enough

— <https://blog.linguisten.de/post/183704949120/any-noun-can-be...>

English has more words than any language on earth. People don't learn or use use most of them because they will be labeled pretentious.

I wonder if despite our large vocabulary, English speakers tend to use a small subsection of it because there are so many non-native speakers. It seems to me from reading and watching people from decades ago that the language was more complex. (I don't mean this as any knock on people who speak English as a second language.)

We don't use most of them because no one could learn them all. There's more than 100,000 hanzi recorded in Chinese. Some quick googling suggests educated Chinese people know 8,000, and the average Chinese person knows around 3,500.

So 3–8%.

Nothing to do with pretention and everything to do with impossibility :D

Sounds... load bearing. Worse than being called pretentious, someone's gonna come along accuse you of being an LLM if you use words that aren't part of the normal lexicon.

Utilizing a breadth of vocabulary won't evince your being an LLM. None have such a habitude. You'll merely attract invidious barbed tonguelets.

> you almost never hear it said where English is that language

I'm willing to bet it's a combination of two factors:

1. you are consuming these things in English, and English natives are less likely to say "English has this word that those other people don't" because they fully understand English so it doesn't seem inscrutable, but some other language is kind of "magical an mysterious" to them. See, e.g., the urban legend that the Chinese word for crisis is "danger" and "opportunity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_crisis There's a whole cottage industry around "that foreign language is so cool compared to English"

2. "this language can say X but another language cannot" is invariably wrong

Have a butchers at my China who thinks the seppos are less precise.

I read some articles the other day about rhyming slang. It all made sense of course, that it's a thing in some cultures. But most rhyming slangs are part of Cants or other special purpose vocabs which often have the intent of obscuring meaning.

But none of that answered why in the absolute world a group would choose to initiate a rhyming slang for things such as the damn stairs. Rhyming slang is purposely obscuring.

It's insane to me, that cockney is half made up of purposely making communication more difficult or insular. Like, I get that there's complicated in group signalling incentives at play, but like, why?

Its cause its fun

Reply on news.ycombinator.com