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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4371 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 26, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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STEM geeks love to use those terms when they do apply, and other people learn words by exposure without necessarily learning them correctly by exposure. You can't infer "'exponential' is for when a thing is growing proportionally to it's present amount" as easily as you can misinfer "'exponential' is for when a thing is growing and it's super duper serious".

(aside: the pedantic geek in me wants to point out that "orders of magnitude" is always applicable when comparing two positive numbers in the same units; it's just not the scaling you'd go to right away when the number of orders is less than 2...)

Of course, many STEM geeks suffer from the same failure, just not with the same words. I suspect any humanities geek could properly explain how "to 'utilize' is to use a thing for something other than its intended purpose" or "to 'utilize' is to make use of a thing that would not have previously been useful" or some such subtlety of meaning that I only discovered in late adulthood, whereas grep tells me that I've written multiple papers and proposals and a dissertation during the period when I'd misinferred that "to 'utilize' is to use a thing and it's super duper serious".

Can you do "leverage" as well? It also now seems to mean "use a thing and it's super duper serious".

"Leverage" seems like a straightforward metaphor to me: "to use a thing to obtain an effect disproportionate to the input effort" (yes, yes, work is conserved; in this metaphor effort is force).

But often someone using that metaphor correctly has reason to be proud, so I can see how the popular meaning might indeed have shifted to "and we’re damn clever for having done so."

I think what it means now is “we’ve used a thing and we’re damn clever for having done so.”

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