this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023

69 points (93.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

34354 readers

1269 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)

Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.

Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.

Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.

Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.

Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.

Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.

Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.

Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

How do you call a word that is so rudimentary that it can't be defined without being redundant? (self.nostupidquestions)

submitted 10 months ago by Ad4mWayn3 to c/nostupidquestions

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I think axiom should fit, but according to its official definition, an axiom is a statement that is taken to be true, and as far as I know, a word can't make an statement by its own.

all 35 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] fubo 44 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Words aren't created by definitions.

Definitions are summaries of the usage of words.

Usage comes first, not definition. Dictionaries, glossaries, etc. are a commentary on usage, attempting to explain to new users of a word what the other people already using that word mean by it.

If someone starts calling some teddy-bears "squee-bears", they don't have to have a written-out definition in mind before they do this. Maybe later, if the term "squee-bear" catches on, someone will write down a definition for it, as a summary of how they've observed the term being used.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You'd have to be pretty strict about what you mean by 'definition' in order to claim this. When words are coined, it seems likely that the speaker knows what he means by the word, even if he hasn't written the definition down somewhere

[–] fubo 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

When Bob comes up with the word "squee-bear", he knows a squee-bear when he sees one, but he might not yet have worked out exactly what makes it a squee-bear to him. He might not yet be able to offer a definition. And if Bob talks about squee-bears to Alice and Charlie, they might start using the word in slightly different ways from Bob.

This sort of thing happens in the history of science, for instance. People start talking about "planets" (originally meaning "wandering stars") or "atoms" ("indivisible units") and then only later does a community of speakers nail down exactly what they mean by "planet" or "atom" and it turns out that planets aren't stars and atoms aren't indivisible.

For people, language use is axiomatic — and messy. We talk about things even when we don't know what they are; we talk about things even when we're not 100% sure what we mean.

Definitions come later.

People run into problems when they put definitions ahead of reality. That's what we see, for example, when creationists try to talk about "species", or transphobes about "woman". They act as if they want a simplistic definition they learned as a child to apply forever, in all context, and for anyone who disagrees to be just wrong. But that's not how language works and it's not how reality works.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm not disagreeing that it can sometimes happen as you've illustrated above. I am saying that it often does happen that coiners of new words know just what they mean by them. The person who came up with 'electrocute' knew exactly what he meant by it - to kill with electricity (notice how the word is a portmanteau of electricity and execute). That the word has started to be used by some as a word to mean something less specific is to me unfortunate, but is a good example of how words change over time. At any rate, it seems obvious that sometimes the definitions of words arrive fully formed at their birth, though not always so

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Excellent write up !

[–] TheYear2525 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The vast majority of words in natural languages aren’t created by somebody like an invention. They slowly form over time and over populations. In fact, I don’t think any of the words in your comment were “coined” in the sense that, say, Shakespeare coined “dwindle”.

Just like species change, I suppose for any precise definition and pronunciation of a word, you could find a person who was the first to use it, but it would almost always be a tiny variation of an existing word, and wouldn’t be considered “new” to a native speaker at that time and place, just a mild accent.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Going off on a tangent here, but the chances that Shakespeare truly invented any words or more than a handful of distinguishable uses is vanishingly small. What Shakespeare did was (1) be a half-educated middle class rube, (2) get popular enough that his colleagues wanted to collect his plays and a printer wanted to publish them, and (3) retained his reputation through the generations so that volume of plays wasn't left to rot.

He was absolutely brilliant, don't get me wrong (most Anti-Stratfordians are a weird combination of classist and ignorant), but the brilliance lies in the ways he played with the forms of poetry and drama, how he found the humanity in so many of his characters (though not all), and how he corralled all of his influences, cultural, literary, personal, and historical, into wholes that were way beyond the sum of their parts. Given the rigidity of Tudor education and expectations of the upper classes, I'd argue a unique voice like his would almost have to come from an "upstart crow." From the perspective of linguistic novelty though, by and large his was just the first known use of words, which were likely in some degree of use in at least one of his various communities (actors, writers, Londoners, and Strafordians to name a few). The OED can only cite the earliest written sources its researchers have found. The fact that so many of "his" communities were poorly documented in the historical and literary record probably explains most of the words ascribed to him.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Semantic prime

[–] Decoy321 1 points 10 months ago

Thank you, kind person. This is exactly the appropriate response!

[–] Decoy321 19 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Do any words like this actually exist, though? I'd wager that failure to define the word sufficiently is more of a limitation on the definer's vocabulary than the word itself.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I certainly can't imagine a word I couldn't define. Some words are defined by their interrelationship, and that can seem circular... but since that interrelationship is how we make sense of the world, I don't particularly see the problem. There's nothing fundamental about that.

[–] scarabic 3 points 10 months ago

My mind went to things like “of” and “is” but it turns out you can define quite a bit about those words and their usage, in a great many words.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Axiomatic is pretty good. Irreducible is another. However, I would argue there are no undescribable words. If that were true, no one could learn certain words in other languages

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I wonder if anyone has ever said something was indescribable, it was just because they weren't aware of the word needed to describe it.

Even in a way, saying something was indescribable is doing a lot of heavy lifting by itself, which is weird.

[–] kozel 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What about words like "happiness" or "love"?

[–] MotoAsh 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

There are many, MANY words that do not have a 1 to 1 relationship between languages. Love is actually one of the more basic concepts most all languages have a word for.

The areas languages gets really interesting are in the idioms. THOSE are the expressions that generally take many words to explain.

Which is why if you want to write easily translatable text, never use idioms.

[–] CobblerScholar 4 points 10 months ago

German is a great example of having words that mean a whole phrase in English, Schadenfreude (humor at someone's expense) for one

[–] kozel 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

As far as I understand, we were not speaking about struggles with translating from one language to another, but about explaining a word within the original language.

[–] MotoAsh 2 points 10 months ago

Then I defer to an earlier answer from someone: ALL words have meanings and definitions. The only way one fails to describe a word is when they do not understand the word.

As Einstein said: "If you cannot explain it to a six year old, you do not understand it yourself."

He was speaking about relativity. If a simple word stumps you, I have bad news...

[–] Sertou 7 points 10 months ago

Fundamental is the term used to describe concepts like points in geometry. This seems like an analogous case, so I suggest it for your use here.

[–] Screwthehole 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think you can always define a word using other words, without repeating the word in question. Just sometimes you have to take a pretty wide circle and the explanation can end up complicated

[–] reddig33 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Are there any words that dont have synonyms?

[–] Screwthehole 2 points 10 months ago

These, either, neither

All can be explained but the explanation is certainly more complicated than simply understanding the word(s)

[–] scarabic 2 points 10 months ago

Good question. Even “stipulation” has “proviso.”

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

All words all symbolic of their referents, but the symbolism is usually arbitrary. So I don't think there are actually any words like that.

[–] meco03211 3 points 10 months ago

That shouldn't be the case. Where that breaks down in more formal contexts is circular definitions. You don't want to define one word using others that simply reference the defined word in their own definition. All words can be defined using the other available words. At some point it would become circular, but that's of no consequence in the scope of all words.

[–] kozel 3 points 10 months ago

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but you could be interested in "circular definition".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

What a great question!!