No Stupid Questions

4145 readers

2 users here now

There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!

Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.

ex. How do I change oil
ex. How to tie shoes
ex. Can you cry underwater?

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!

Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice 🍉.

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

admin@lemmy.ca

What does it mean when someone responds or replies in an elliptical or orthogonal way? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by cheese_greater@lemmy.world to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Someone was very lightly chiding me for saying Shia Leboef looked a very hard 39 remarking that they were 38 and it reflected badly on them.

Then I replied Shia sort of resembled Hunter Biden...

I cant trace my mental stack that led to that formulation

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Elliptical answers (where most stuff is clipped, except a few words) usually mean what you'd expect, with the omitted info being usually inferrable by context.

[Alice] Hey Bob, did you see my notebook?
[Bob] Over the desk.

The full answer would be "Yes, I saw your notebook. It is over the desk". That's only implied, by Bob mentioning the location; not explicitly said. But Alice can easily infer "this is the location of the notebook", and that if Bob knows its location then yes, he saw it.

This pops up due to the co-operative principle, specially the maxims of relevance and clarity.

Now, orthogonal answers (where the "answer" doesn't answer the question, like in your example) are a bloody mess. I think they're mostly caused by a mismatch between context (shared by the participants of the conversation) vs. individual info (exclusive to one of the participants). I could see them happening fairly often in the situation from your example, where the "individual info" is the strain of thought one of the participants followed.

[Warning: take this with a grain of salt, this has a sample size of one] I'm also predicting they happen fairly often when one (but not both) of the speech participants is autistic. Autists in general don't rely as much on implicatures as neurotypical people do, so one side starts seeing implicatures where there's none, and the other doesn't catch them up. Re-using that example above:

[Alice] Hey Bob, did you see my notebook? (implied: "please, where's my notebook?")
[Bob, autistic] Yes, I did. (Alice's implicature was not addressed, so Bob answered her question literally.)

From personal experience, it drives both sides of the conversation crazy, until they backtrack to re-find the context. It helps a bit if you know the other side is autistic, though. (Sorry, I felt like rambling about this. It happened with me today.)