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.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2014-01-29 08:18 am (UTC)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.