Things I wish there were words for

[simont]

Failing to draw a distinction between any worthwhile things. There's a particular way in which a concept – a noun or adjective, or a philosophical term of art – can fail to be practically useful: by being defined in such a way that nothing, or nothing interesting, satisfies its definition. Or else nothing (interesting) doesn't satisfy its definition. As soon as you notice you're talking about a concept which encompasses either everything or nothing, you're usually wasting your time (except in the rare cases where you really intended to be talking about either everything or nothing), and should instead be looking for some alternative concept (or a less absolutist interpretation of the same concept) which manages to draw a dividing line such that at least one interesting thing falls on each side of it.

I want a word for that particular form of uselessness, so that I can much more economically point out when somebody (certainly including me) has perpetrated it, and it doesn't take me a whole paragraph just to explain why I'm giving up and trying a different approach.

Moral versus tactical ‘should’. It keeps striking me as an unfortunate property of English that the word ‘should’, and many of its synonyms and related words, are sometimes used to indicate moral obligation and sometimes used to indicate the tactically (or strategically) optimal course of action. Usually it's obvious from context which sense is meant in any given case, but not always, and I've seen just a couple too many arguments flare up from somebody misconstruing a ‘should’ as moral when it was intended tactically, or (more rarely) vice versa. It's a pain to keep tacking on disambiguating parentheses such as ‘(I'm speaking in the tactical sense here)’, so I want two clearly different words that can be used in place of the ambiguous ‘should’, at least in sensitive circumstances and perhaps more widely too.

Comments

[meihua.livejournal.com]

I'm so not a fan of "should", "ought" and similar words. In counselling training, one spends some time looking at words like that and the ideas behind them.

Nowadays I don't really use 'should' in either a moral or a tactical sense. I reject the moral use, and I tend to replace the tactical use with a statement using the word "useful" which describes how a particular tactic might reach a particular goal. As in, "If you want to get an x, doing a y might be useful".

[(Anonymous)]

'Ought' is a good word to convey the moral sense of 'should' (which I do not reject because, you know, that's like rejecting right and wrong). While it is possible to say 'you ought to take that bishop so that he doesn't pin your rook', it's not the immediate connotation that springs to mind -- that is, I think, the moral sense.

As for the other sense, you could use 'had better' ('you had better move that fragile ornament before the crowd of small children arrive'), perhaps?

S.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

I don't really agree with the way of seeing the world that your comment is coming from, so I'm not sure how to reply. Rejecting "right and wrong" seems like an excellent idea to me, and also I'd always say something like, "Could you move that before the small children arrive?", or, "I think the children might knock that over..."