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Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

That seems to dumb down the language, rather than improve or evolve it.

> Skipping lunch today because sleep.

What is that supposed to mean? You need to take a nap during lunch; you got too much sleep the night before and are groggy, etc.

Why not add a few more words to make the sentence understandable (in this case non-ambiguous).

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It means sleep was the cause of lunch being missed. No more details are provided or implied. Off the record, one could guess that the speaker didn't want to remark on oversleeping due to the negative connotations, and is instead leaving the answer vague in the hopes of don't-ask-don't-tell. Depending on the audience, this may also be exactly enough information to be unambiguous with the fewest number of words; a friend may have had prior experiences that set the default interpretation and context of mid-day sleep.

TL;DR: Don't mistake dumb for compression.

I think the implication of dumb is there, but it's supposed to be transferred to the subject of the sentence. As in, the person is mocking himself for being lazy.

How are you pulling original data out of a lossy compression method?

Lossy compression always uses heuristics to guide compression and decompression. In this case, the heuristic is 'my brain works similarly; why would I have written this?'

How do you interpret any spoken or written sentence? It is all lossy.

Same way you do when you look at a jpg.

Because easy, natural, optional, and precise ambiguity is one of the best features a language meant for people can have.

I want to say exactly what I mean to say, neither more nor less.

It's just social media memetic jibber jabber.

The confusion is part of the joke, really; people that are in the same boat, friends of the person that says it, or regulars in the same community (say, Reddit) will go empathic and go "I like totally know what you mean, like". Retweet reblog like favorite pinned shared etc.

Those that aren't in on the joke go "because huh?", which is funny. Because lol internet.

It means the nature of sleep necessitates the skipping of lunch. This isn't actually true however, as we are all well aware. Sleep and lunch are not at odds with one another.

It's a poor use of the new word, as you've demonstrated. It doesn't mean the new word is therefore universally unclear.

But of course we're going to get into a pedantic and possibly violent argument over such a small and insignificant part of both our lives, because Internet.

Does anyone think that the speaker's accent has something to do with it? Saying these sentences in my Australian accent just sounds plain wrong and slow. Maybe it's faster in the American accent.

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