[geeks] KDE "konsole" cluebat?

[der Mouse]

> There is no "wrong way" to express something, as long as the
> something was successfully expressed or communicated (depending on
> the situation).

> What is incorrect about successful communication?

Without a "correct" and an "incorrect", there is no way to arrange that
what I mean when I use a word, phrase, or construct is even roughly the
same as what you understand when you see/hear it - or conversely.

Consider what would happen if I were to start using the string "apple"
to refer to the thing you put in a wall with hinges so you can cross
through the wall: without any way to call that usage incorrect and the
use of the string "door" for the same construct correct, there would be
no way we could communicate about it at all.  And indeed there is
nothing inherently correct or incorrect about either; consider "pomme"
and "porte".  Or consider the difference between "window glass" and
"glass window" - without agreement that it is correct to put adjectives
before the nouns they modify and incorrect to put them after, there
would be no way to distinguish the two.

I see this as basically the same issue; the only difference is the
exact nature of the rule and the ambiguity it prevents/resolves.  In
the particular construct that started things off, there was an
ambiguity: the construct used violated the rules, so I as a reader had
to decide which rules were being violated.  In this particular case,
other constraints, such as context, made one particular resolution (in
favor of this being a violation of the distinction between metaphor and
simile) significantly stronger than the others (such as this being a
case of someone deciding to spell a half-dozen words dramatically
differently, akin to my "door"/"apple" example above - indeed, the
degree to which I have to contrive extreme examples here is a measure
of how compelling the other parse was in this case).

In short, what I see wrong with this is the sloppiness it indicates.
"Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever" - yes, it's a joke, but
there's a serious issue lurking inside it; when all you *have* is
"like, whatever" you can't say much.

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