> Whenever the topic of names comes up, I reread one of my favorite blog posts I've ever come across: "What's in a Name" by Olin Shivers [0].
Thank you for this! It was a really engrossing read.
> When he said “distal access,” he assumed that you, too, have structures on one side of your head representing what you know about, say, Neil Armstrong, and a smaller structure on the other side of your brain encoding the name “Neil Armstrong,” and cognitive mechanisms allowing you to fetch the former given the latter.
I thought this was an interesting example that glossed over some (to me) really interesting things in cross-contextual (usually cultural?) miscommunication. This assumption that the other person you're talking to has the same concept in mind for a word is at the root of all communication we do.
A simple example would just be UK to US English -- something as simple as "fanny," which has differing meanings to both populations.
For a non-geographical contextual gap, we can look at slang like "salty." a "salty meal," "salty boy," and "salty dog" are all completely different things.
Some of the biggest difficulties I run into with communication aren't with people who speak no English at all (I live in Japan), but people who speak English in a dialect(?) that's close to what I expect, but slightly different and used differently (e.g. as high context instead of low context). Sometimes I can be speaking with someone from India who has perfectly grammatically correct, fluent English, and suddenly be thrown for a loop when I realize that a word had a completely different meaning for both of us without either of us realizing it.
It's just a really interesting concept I think about a lot since I do a lot of cross-cultural communication.
Thank you for this! It was a really engrossing read.
> When he said “distal access,” he assumed that you, too, have structures on one side of your head representing what you know about, say, Neil Armstrong, and a smaller structure on the other side of your brain encoding the name “Neil Armstrong,” and cognitive mechanisms allowing you to fetch the former given the latter.
I thought this was an interesting example that glossed over some (to me) really interesting things in cross-contextual (usually cultural?) miscommunication. This assumption that the other person you're talking to has the same concept in mind for a word is at the root of all communication we do.
A simple example would just be UK to US English -- something as simple as "fanny," which has differing meanings to both populations.
For a non-geographical contextual gap, we can look at slang like "salty." a "salty meal," "salty boy," and "salty dog" are all completely different things.
Some of the biggest difficulties I run into with communication aren't with people who speak no English at all (I live in Japan), but people who speak English in a dialect(?) that's close to what I expect, but slightly different and used differently (e.g. as high context instead of low context). Sometimes I can be speaking with someone from India who has perfectly grammatically correct, fluent English, and suddenly be thrown for a loop when I realize that a word had a completely different meaning for both of us without either of us realizing it.
It's just a really interesting concept I think about a lot since I do a lot of cross-cultural communication.