Fun Stuff > CHATTER
English is weird
Morituri:
Sometimes I want to be a schwa.
They're never stressed.
Ignominious:
I'm in Kerry at the moment and it's strange to hear people a whole people speaking English with native fluency but in an accent that is clearly suited to another very different language. Its something you never hear elsewhere from someone non-British who's learned English, no matter how fluent.
Kerry, for the unfamiliar is a deeply rural part of southern Ireland.
Another observation, each Irish county seems to have a different punctuative word. Kerry is "so", Dublin is "like", Mayo is "then". Not sure how they get decided on.
Case:
Is there an English-language term for a style of argumentation that overwhelmingly substitute carefully crafted syllogisms (and/or examination of the topic from multiple POVs) for forceful assertions?
I mean 'it is' - sentences, or worse, their grandiose cousins, the 'they think' - sentences ("argumentatum ad telepathy").
I don't mean 'dogmatic', as that would imply that the assertion is wrong, or only right when viewed through a particularly narrow ideological lense. More of a sort of "advertising department"-style of argumentation.
LTK:
Aren't those weasel words?
Case:
--- Quote from: LTK on 14 Jun 2018, 16:47 ---Aren't those weasel words?
--- End quote ---
That doesn't sound like a good description of what I have in mind (well, one could of course question whether what I have in mind has a correspondence in reality) - It's rather 'dogmatic style of speech, but without a dogma'. A dogmatic is someone who is unwilling to even discuss certain tenets they see as fundamental - but those tenets stay the same (barring, of course, the usual human flaws like hypocrisy etc.) - a dogmatic doesn't have a different dogma for every situation.
I mean speech that that resembles dogmatism in it's claim to axiomatic truth, but is unshackled by a set of core tenets - a dogmatist's argumentation is still vulnerable to examination of internal consistency e.g. whether conclusions drawn from one core tenet conflict with another core tenet. I mean a style of speech that is almost exclusively a string of assertions - which may or may not be true, but the speaker hardly ever bothers supporting their assertions with evidence, or striving for internal consistency. Another characteristic is near-total absence of qualifiers, or an acknowledgement of the underlying paradigm - statements are absolute, forceful, with a tendency to sweeping generalizations.
Come to think of it, it seems more like a "you-are-with-me-or-not" speech - you either agree with the assertion, or you're not in the in-group.
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