XKCD

[avevale_intelligencer]

http://xkcd.com/1322/

I can't read alt text on this iPad and I'm too lazy to find a workaround, but I think the alt text on this one should be "After two weeks of being called "Fascist Paedophile" loudly and in public, he finally admitted that using the right word was important after all."

Also, there are actually very few statements to which "Who cares?" is the right answer.

Comments

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

"Stay warm little flappers, and find lots of plant eggs" is the alt text.
What's been done there is quite clever, in that the phrases used instead of the more normal ones are easy enough to understand without ambiguity, but I agree with your general principle.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

And a community organiser who loves his children (as I imagine Beret Person to be) should have no problem with being called a fascist paedophile. And yet somehow it doesn't sound right.

Language is flexible. There's nothing wrong with using the wrong word. My objection is simply to the not caring.

[batyatoon]

The difference being, of course, that nobody would hear the words "fascist paedophile" and understand "community organizer who loves children." The problem there isn't that it somehow doesn't sound right, it's that it conveys a very specific meaning that isn't the one you (ostensibly) intend to be understood.

If you use the wrong words and yet make yourself effortlessly understood (not the case throughout here; it cost me some effort to parse "spacelight" and "flappy planes"), then "who cares if the words are wrong?" is a reasonably defensible position. And all the reasons that you should still care have to do with social convention, which while still very important is not about effective communication of verbal content.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Well, while the position is obviously defensible since you're defending it, I don't believe "who cares?" is ever a position one should defend, since the very existence of a threat to its defences indicates that someone does care and therefore the position is invalid.

And "us[ing] the wrong words and yet mak[ing] yourself effortlessly understood" is a bit of a straw man. As you say, understanding this cartoon took effort, however small, like those infuriating things on Facebook that tell you how wonderful your mind is because you can read misspelled words. And that was the point of it. Beret Person deliberately made it difficult for the other stick person to understand him, so that he could indicate to the other person, not that he was inspired to an inventive use of language by the beauty around him, but specifically that he, Beret Person, did not care which words he used for what, or whether anyone understood him, and that nobody else should care either.

It's supposed to take effort to understand when someone uses the wrong words, by which I mean that it's not supposed to take effort when one uses the right ones. Not for any reason to do with social convention, but because words are tools with specific jobs and the right tool works best in the right job. Because as well as their simple meaning, words carry lots of other meanings, and the use of the right wrong word (as, for instance, in some contexts, "socialist") can make entirely the wrong meaning effortlessly understood.

Which is not to say that people shouldn't use the wrong worms ever, or have fun with language, or talk the way their parents did, or be proud of being from wherever they're from, or whatever other thing is going to come up. Everyone should do that. Everyone should do it because they care. Caring is a good reason.

Nobody should ever not care about language. That way lies confusion, madness, decay, and death.

[batyatoon]

Well, we can agree on that last point, certainly: nobody should ever not care about language. But that's not the same thing as "nobody should ever not care whether the words they use in any given situation are the generally accepted correct ones."

If words are tools with specific jobs, it stands to reason that there's nothing wrong with experimenting by applying a tool to a job it wasn't designed for; you may achieve something interesting at least, and you may achieve something spectacular. I once saw a guy hook up a power drill to a pepper-grinder, which did exactly what he wanted it to: it produced large quantities of freshly ground pepper very fast, a goal otherwise impossible for a single person, made easy by using those tools the wrong way.

Generally with words that's not going to happen, except perhaps in the context of poetry -- but I've seen works of poetry that prove that sometimes ignoring standard usage is the best way to convey meaning.

(I don't think this comic is an example of that. Beret Person is generally amusing and I'm fond of him, but I wouldn't take him as a role model, and I agree with your assessment that he doesn't really care whether he's understood.)

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

You can read the alt text if you go to m.xkcd.com. There's a link there for it.

[deborah_c]

Ah, I'd not found that! There's also http://heavyconsulting.net/touchxkcd/, which I use.

[aunty_marion]

I installed an xkcd Browser app on my new Samsung Galaxy Tab, which gives the alt.text with a long press-and-hold, and has a little speech-bubble button for it too. I can't imagine that there isn't something similar for iOS.