On 10/8/2020 7:10 PM, Michael Stone wrote:
Can you provide any data to back that up? I find it often to be quite the opposite. Sloppy use of language very frequently leads to miscommunication, sometimes of a very serious nature.And yet correcting people in contexts where there's no real ambiguity simply derails the conversation and distracts from the real point.
I will concede that can happen, but the point is divergent from mine. There is a difference between taking care one's own speech is precise, making a general request that people take care with their speech, and correcting someone else's speech.
Context is important. Are you confusing this mailing list with a two hundred million dollar science program?
I made a general statement that holds true for both. I am not confusing anything. Whether context is important or not is beside the point. Whether three hundred million dollars is at stake or not, precision will serve one well.
And how, exactly, does that matter?If you don't understand how 1,000,000,000,000 bytes is different from 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, then I don't know what to tell you. They are not the same. They are different. Whether that difference is significant or not depends upon the situation.You dodged the question of how that actually matters, in context. I'm just going to stop here, enjoy pedantry.
What does "mattering" have to do with it? Different is different. By simply being consistent and precise, one needn't worry about whether something "matters" or not. The situation is much like any other good habit. Being habitually precise covers one whether the situation is of great import or not.