Comment by aikah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aikah | Hacker News Reader

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> the largest performance indicator of a child's success is the value their parents place on education.

+100

> This means that we need to stop heaping blame on teachers, administrators, schools and local authorities for perceived inadequacies.

Well sometimes authorities are to blame. Look, in my country,being a teacher used to be like being a lawyer or a doctor.

It used to be a prestigious profession.

Then some politicians,influencial thinkers came in and said,"we need to focus on children,they have special needs,they are always right and if they cant learn properly it's the adults fault". 30 years forward and the education here is totally broken,teachers are despised both by students and parents who want instant gratification no matter how dumb their offspring is.

But hey,they cant be wrong,they've been told all their life they are "special" and always right ...

> Regardless of whether the parent's are rich or poor, the children of these parents often struggle, and achieve below expected results in national examinations.

The big difference is rich people can literally buy a career for their offspring even if they perform poorly at school. At worse, they'll have a job at mom and pop's business.

> The big difference is rich people can literally buy a career for their offspring

Details? Where do I go to buy a career? I'm not being sarcastic, I actually want to know.

Mom or Dad to business partner: if you want to make this deal with me, give my kid a management position somewhere on the project.

Or "if you give my kid an internship then I'll give you the keys to my ski lodge for this season"

That is not buying a career. That's making a deal. The guy said:

> rich people can literally buy a career

I'm not being sarcastic here. It used to be possible to purchase a commission in the military. That is speaking historically.

I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't careers today you can literally purchase. Franchising comes kind of close, and running a taxi in NYC comes close. In ancient times, you could purchase the position of tax collector.

Anyway, that person should not have said "literally" unless he meant it.

Literally - "in effect : virtually" [1].

[1]http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

That isn't correct usage. (A falliable human being putting it in one particular dictionary doesn't mean it's correct.)

Even someone who thinks that language should not be rule-based still should not use it, if their goal is to communicate clearly and concisely---since it does not achieve that.

So ultimately, it is incorrect regardless of your views on rules of language.

Outside of a jargon context, the meaning of an English word is what the majority of word users agree it means, because that's what other people understand when the word is used.

"Literally" has been debased by overuse for emphasis, and now it no longer means what it used to mean.

See e.g. https://nowtoronto.com/news/in-defence-of-the-figurative-and... and http://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2013/aug/14/lan... for more discussion.

If you're interested, take a look at my comment which is a nephew to your comment. Here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8808616

    > it is incorrect regardless of your views on rules of
    > language

If you've managed to stumble upon an English-language equivalent of Académie française or the Icelandic Language Institute, with the power to define right and wrong in English, I'm sure we'd all love a link... Generally the closest thing we have is "one particular dictionary" (OED) but it aims to be descriptive, rather the prescriptive.

However, regarding:

    > That isn't correct usage

You can probably learn something unexpected from: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17337706

When people change the language in ways that make it inferior for any reason (including due to being confusing), that is incorrect.

It's also incorrect to use wood to build a house that is twice the thickness needed.

It's also incorrect to build a rocket that uses an inferior type of fuel.

These are not matters of social dictat.

We don't need an Academie francaise for English because we should be taught the above principle in school and we should correct others when they make mistakes, in appropriate circumstances.

Another principle: We should change the language to improve it when it is trivial to do so; so even if "literal" were well-established in the opposite meaning, we now know better and should stop doing it. But I do not believe it is well-established, despite the article you linked.

Here is something for you to go away and think about...

You talk about language as being "confusing" or "inferior". You clearly have strongly held criteria for those. Where have they come from?

Has the English language changed in the last 1,000 years? How have you decided which of those changes to adopt? Were all those changes improvements, given your strongly held criteria? What about in the last 500 years? Which year did the version of English that you believe is most "correct" or "superior" occur? Are we currently at "peak" English?

What improvement would modifying the meaning of "literal" bring? Do you know what the word etymology means? Does the etymology of "literal" support your desire to change its meaning? If the root of a word has subtly changed between its Classical roots and emergence in Anglo-Norman French, Middle English, or whatever, which of these is superior? If the root is unclear, and could be Latin or Greek, and has subtly different meanings, which is the right one to use? What about modern English words that have been adopted from - say - Hindi?

...

Having pondered those, perhaps you could examine the rest of your comment. In the phrase "the thickness needed", what criteria define 'needed'? Cost? Durability? Ability to restrict noise? Foundation strength? Could these criteria change from house to house? Could people hold different opinions on those subjects, and both be right? In the phrase "inferior type of fuel", what constitutes 'inferior'? Could safety margins vs cost lead two experts to come up with different opinions on which fuel was superior?

I don't find your list of questions helpful, because I've thought a lot more about this topic than you give me credit for.

What would be helpful would be a counter-argument, if you have one.

If you had thought about them, you might have answers for them!

Pedanticism of this nature is literally the key to living a frustrated and lonely life. You asked for a good faith reply and I gave it to you. You then decided to play your "trick" and point out that you're actually making a totally unrelated grammatical dispute with the original poster.

I won't be falling for this again and replying to you further in the future.

I hope it feels good to be "right" all the time.

I wasn't playing a trick. There are times when using "literally" in the figurative sense actually makes sense, even though I don't approve. But this is not one. So I thought maybe the person actually meant it in the non-figurative sense.

If you want evidence that I'm an honest person, look at my comment history. I don't go around tricking people and trying to win arguments by deception. In fact, I frequently call people out for being nasty in various ways, much like you are doing here.

I can understand why you think I'm trying to trick people and I was worried that would happen. That's why I talked about historical and quasi-examples of people buying careers. I didn't want you to think or feel that I was playing a trick.

Please realize language has ambiguities and is not a program that is compiled. Deliberately nitpicking the meaning of words from someone who is generously offering to clarify a statement for you looks like a sign of bad faith. Use a charitable interpretation and figure out the idea he/she was getting at.

Clearly, money/power/fame/beauty can "buy" things even if there is no currency changing hands. That is the point the previous poster was making. Wealth is influence, and influence gets you favors, like a foot into a career.

Yes, parts of this conversation reflect poor judgement on my part. I wasn't thinking too hard about it at the time.

I disagree. aikah made a statement, which Javert wanted more detail on. jackvalentine claimed to explain what the other poster had said, but it didn't actually match up. He was probably right about what was meant, but maybe he wasn't and there's no real reason for the rest of us to assume it's an accurate clarification of what aikah meant.

If it had been the original poster making the clarification then moaning about 'literally' would have been pedantic, but it was not, and so therefore it was justified - it was making the point that the interpretation given by jackvalentine did not actually clarify the statement as made, and that Javert had assumed something else, more interesting was being said. At that point the conversation depressingly quickly devolves into name calling, threats and patronisation.

> Clearly, money/power/fame/beauty can "buy" things even if there is no currency changing hands. That is the point the previous poster was making.

According to you. Javert was actually using a charitable interpretation when he assumed that the original maker of the statement meant what they had said.

As far as I can tell this entire subthread consists of people uncharitably failing to spot that Javert was not in fact trying to score points, (or believes that language is a program to be compiled, or would benefit from a list of topics to meditate on about the evolution of language) and was merely asking for more detail, and getting upset that he is skeptical their trivial 'explanations' actually explain what was originally meant.

It's mainly a lot of people freaking out about their hot button topics without actually spending any brain power on understanding what the other person is saying and why.

> You asked for a good faith reply

He did, but not from you, since you don't know what Aikah actually meant. Regardless, your freakout is unseemly.

I think he means that they can send their kids to Ivy League or equivalent.

Sadly what killed k-12 teaching as a profession was a side effect of allowing women into the rest of the workforce.

For a long time, teaching was one of the few professions allowed to women. Thus, the best women became teachers, if they wanted jobs.

When you have the choice of becoming a teacher or: a doctor, investment banker, scientist, lawyer, etc., it isn't much of a choice.

where are you?

He's French.

Or Swedish :p

Australia, I believe:

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753907)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com