wtf does this even mean
It reads like a question simultaneously sent through google translate and a thesaurus. I’ve tried several times, but I just cannot work out what I’m being asked.
And yet it’s both grammatically and semantically correct.
Yeah
wtf does this even mean
OP is asking two things:
- the most controversial shit that you say
- the shit that you say and think “mmh, maybe I’m wrong but I’ll keep saying it”
…or at least that’s how I interpreted it.
I read it as these two questions:
- Which controversial sentence said over public broadcast media do you disagree with the critiques of?
- Which controversial broadcast sentence do you come closest to agreeing with, even if you don’t think it true and hate yourself for even contemplating as true
Don’t know if I’m right or but that reading makes most sense to me after a couple of passes and some thinking.
We’re both interpreting it slightly different ways:
- you - the utterance is specific, the speaker is unspecified
- me - “utterance” is a placeholder for “discourse”, the speaker is whoever answers the question
To be honest this is really cool. Now I’m curious if one of us got it right, or if we’re both reading it wrong.
How could anyone perceive it any other way?
As you said in the other comment, the sentence is grammatically OK¹. However, it’s still a huge sentence, with a few less common words (e.g. “utterance”), split into two co-ordinated clauses, and both clauses are by themselves complex.
To add injury there’s quite a few ways to interpret “over the airwaves” (e.g. is this just radio, or does the internet count too?)
So people are giving up parsing the whole thing.
I also write like this, in a convoluted way², but I kind of get why people gave up.
- I’m not sure if it’s semantically OK due to the word “utterance”.
- Except when translating stuff, since I’m forced to roughly follow the “informational layout” of the original. That’s usually a PITA but it helps wonder for clarity!
But that just means its issue is it’s verbally unfamiliar, no?
Makes me wonder how many people read scriptures/manifestos.
[Just to be clear for everyone: I’m describing the issue, not judging anyone. I’m in no position to criticise the OP.]
The unfamiliar vocab is just the cherry on the cake. The main issue is that it’s hard to track everything; at least, when reading it for the first time. And most people don’t bother reading an excerpt enough times to understand it.
Makes me wonder how many people read scriptures/manifestos.
Almost nobody, I believe. And I’d go further: I don’t think that most people read longer texts that would “train” them for this sort of stuff.
Welp, there goes anyone’s claims here of being an authentic political theorist/scholar/analyst.
Perhaps, based on that, the issue is expectations. One expects a certain outcome from how someone is explaining something and is thrown off-guard when it takes a twist. Though that’s not really anyone’s fault. I relate too well to the other perspective, as a non-native speaker who is, in some way, also neurodivergent, as well as a writer immersed in mental exercises. I just have had a kind of faith that one might say it’s a universally trainable skill (think math or jigsaw puzzles) rather than seemingly innate. I may read The Wheel of Time and War and Peace just fine if I don’t establish my own upper limit to complexity. Interactive AI, through their lack of the issue we discuss, implicitly show us that “unintelligible” and “complex” may overlap but don’t necessarily have to.
My most controversial discourse* can be roughly phrased as “screw intentions”, “your intentions don’t matter”, “go pave Hell with your «intenshuns»”. It isn’t a single utterance*; I say stuff like this all the time, and regardless of the utterance used to convey said discourse, people will still disagree with it.
The one that I’m sometimes at fault is “people who assume are pieces of shit and deserve to be treated as such”. Because sometimes it is reasonable to assume (to take something as true even if you don’t know it for sure); just nowhere as much as people do.
*I’m being specific with terminology because it’s a big deal for me. “Discourse” is what you say, regardless of the specific words; “utterance” is a specific chain of language usage (be it voiced, gestured, written, etc.)
One time I accidentally said a kid’s name on a 2-way radio, and we were not supposed to use their names over the airwaves.
I’m not sure if I had critics thought, it was just a mistake
