The royal we
Nov. 19th, 2006 01:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethThere are days when first person plural pronoun irritates me.
Yes, I realise is a bit of a wide thing, to be annoyed by grammar.
But while 'I' and 'my' are perfectly sensible words, 'we' and 'our' frequently piss me off.
Because saying 'we' either includes the listener without asking them, or excludes but outnumbers them. And honestly, far as I can tell, the vast majority of the time the speaker means 'I but with a bit more authority'. Like when they're talking about schemas and they say 'our schema', and how do they know what my schema is? Or anyone else? They don't, they just want to make their own look bigger.
My schema is regularly rather different than that of others. I mean, when she asked us to say the first word came into our head about the word 'funeral' there weren't anyone else said 'Buffy'.
I realise I'm strange.
But this is why I don't like 'we', especially about schemas. Every individual has their very own, and quite often they don't quite match.
And once you set one up as 'our' then any that disagree are 'not-ours' and then suddenly it turns into a right and wrong sort of a thing and it winds me up no end.
Everyone have different schemas, different maps inside their head. Is one why that everyone has different interpretations.
Mind you, this book chapter started off talking like words have inherent meaning, because 'we all know' what they mean. And right then author loses *all* his points, because the hell we do. Meaning is totally arbitrary, and quite different in each and every mind. I mean, if I say 'tree' he reckons everyone knows what I mean. But I reckon everyone will have quite a different tree in their head, or a whole folder of different trees, and people that don't speak english won't have a tree like english speaker tree at all. Unless other languages happen to use the same word. I don't know that.
This to me is obvious, and I can point to the other book as says it is obvious, but this book here doesn't seem to think so.
The chapter is about assumptions and how we bring relevant knowledge to bear on a text in order to figure it out. And I think it has thus far failed to mention the *really really important bit*, which is that such knowledge is culture bound, is like common sense, is full of hidden and very variable when you get right down to it. I mean it mentions that we have different schemas, but then it goes on like... like they're all referring to actual facts outside someone's head, which don't strike me as true.
It winds me up.
... Which doesn't mean the stuff they're writing about is useless, because if people come up with any kind of shared similar meanings from a text at all they're obviously doing something shared and similar, so I keep learning the words and thought tools. I just, you know, rant about it on LJ and scribble in the margins a lot.
I'd say it were silly to get wound up over this stuff, but it do seem to suggest I'm studying the right subject area...
Yes, I realise is a bit of a wide thing, to be annoyed by grammar.
But while 'I' and 'my' are perfectly sensible words, 'we' and 'our' frequently piss me off.
Because saying 'we' either includes the listener without asking them, or excludes but outnumbers them. And honestly, far as I can tell, the vast majority of the time the speaker means 'I but with a bit more authority'. Like when they're talking about schemas and they say 'our schema', and how do they know what my schema is? Or anyone else? They don't, they just want to make their own look bigger.
My schema is regularly rather different than that of others. I mean, when she asked us to say the first word came into our head about the word 'funeral' there weren't anyone else said 'Buffy'.
I realise I'm strange.
But this is why I don't like 'we', especially about schemas. Every individual has their very own, and quite often they don't quite match.
And once you set one up as 'our' then any that disagree are 'not-ours' and then suddenly it turns into a right and wrong sort of a thing and it winds me up no end.
Everyone have different schemas, different maps inside their head. Is one why that everyone has different interpretations.
Mind you, this book chapter started off talking like words have inherent meaning, because 'we all know' what they mean. And right then author loses *all* his points, because the hell we do. Meaning is totally arbitrary, and quite different in each and every mind. I mean, if I say 'tree' he reckons everyone knows what I mean. But I reckon everyone will have quite a different tree in their head, or a whole folder of different trees, and people that don't speak english won't have a tree like english speaker tree at all. Unless other languages happen to use the same word. I don't know that.
This to me is obvious, and I can point to the other book as says it is obvious, but this book here doesn't seem to think so.
The chapter is about assumptions and how we bring relevant knowledge to bear on a text in order to figure it out. And I think it has thus far failed to mention the *really really important bit*, which is that such knowledge is culture bound, is like common sense, is full of hidden and very variable when you get right down to it. I mean it mentions that we have different schemas, but then it goes on like... like they're all referring to actual facts outside someone's head, which don't strike me as true.
It winds me up.
... Which doesn't mean the stuff they're writing about is useless, because if people come up with any kind of shared similar meanings from a text at all they're obviously doing something shared and similar, so I keep learning the words and thought tools. I just, you know, rant about it on LJ and scribble in the margins a lot.
I'd say it were silly to get wound up over this stuff, but it do seem to suggest I'm studying the right subject area...