Purposes of Descriptions
I wonder whether this is a shameful thing to confess.
Well, what is it?
I have always thought that my behavior may have been somehow, you know . . .
I don't know a bit. Your behavior may have been what?
Inappropriate, I dare say.
Inappropriate? Did you have sexual relationships with that woman?
Huh? What woman?
I mean, the intern.
Huh? I don't have any intern.
Don't mind. Anyway, what is it?
Well, to tell the truth, . . . I have always hated poems.
. . .
. . . Was that something that robs you of speech?
Are you all right? I understand that it took a great deal of courage for you to confess it.
Anyway, I have always hated poems.
Why?
First of all, I hate the thing called 'poetic license'. Who gave poets such a license?
Being asked who gave it . . .
It's fine to make words rhyme, but please, at least, observe grammar. That will be minimal requirement when one speaks or writes.
Don't you need an article before 'minimal'? I thought that 'requirement' was a countable noun.
I mean, 'a minimal requirement'. . . . I admit we make mistakes, but poets violate grammar maliciously. There is a big difference there.
I wonder whether 'maliciously' is the right word for it.
Grammar exists because it's necessary in order to make words understood accurately. I hope that they pursue poetic effects on the condition that they observe grammar!
Well, you can hope anything, but there will no hope that your hope will be heeded by somebody.
I know . . .
Is there another reason for your hate toward poems?
There is. Why don't poems say what they want to say, more explicitly?
Being asked why . . .
Why do they put on airs and use equivocal expressions?
I don't know whether they are putting on airs or not.
If the poet is happy, why doesn't he or she just say so?
Happiness isn't one, and he or she can't express it by just declaring being happy.
Of course. So, he or she can modify it using adverbs. If his or her happiness is mingled with sadness, why doesn't he or she say it's 74% happiness and 26% sadness?
What kind of poem is that? . . . I understand that you are way too not cut out for to understand poems.
I'm aware of that. I understand that poems are based on common associations among the poet and the readers. For example, the color, red, is supposed to be associated with passion; the season, fall, with melancholy; the disappointed love with sorrow. But why do I have to be forced to have such stereotypical associations?
You are most probably not cut out for poems if you associate disappointed loves with comfort.
Well, but there may be another way of reading poems: you don't need to try to understand what the poet meant; you can just relish the feelings roused by the poem.
You mean, it's OK that I feel totally different emotions from what the poet meant?
Why not? I agree that if the purpose of poems is to make what poets mean understood by the readers, there will be more suitable ways.
Well, I would try that way of reading poems, sometime.
Well, the preamble was rather long, but my purpose isn't to accuse poems, but to distinguish the kind of descriptions we will talk about from the others. We will talk about descriptions whose primal purpose is to convey information accurately. I admit that there are other descriptions like poems, but they aren't our concern.
OK.
What Does Descriptions' Being Explicit Mean?
Our goal is to describe things unambiguously accurately. If our description can be understood in more than one meanings, it will be understood by receivers in more than one meanings. Expecting otherwise will be unreasonable.
Yes, it is unreasonable.
So, we want to describe things explicitly.
Well, fine, but you have to clarify what being 'explicit' means.
It's not to rely on implicit premises.
You seem to have just used 'implicit' instead of 'explicit'.
Well, . . . first, let's consider how descriptions can be ambiguous.
All right.
Words aren't things that can be understood unambiguously by themselves. For example, the word, 'run', has 15 meanings as a verb, 13 meanings as a noun, according to a Oxford Dictionary of English.
Hmm, aren't there too many? I wonder how Earthians can understand each other with such a language.
Words' having more than one meanings isn't the only issue. 'The chair' in a sentence isn't just a general chair, but a specific chair: it may mean a chair of a coronation or an electric chair for a condemned man.
There is a great difference between your sitting on the former and your sitting on the latter.
We have to clarify those differences.
How can you clarify those differences? You can't declare each time which chair you mean among possible uncountable chairs.
I can't. After I identified the chair once, I will call the chair just 'the chair'. After all, it's impossible for a sentence to be explicit by itself. The Sentence stands in the context, and has to be argued whether it's explicit or not in the context. If a description can be understood in the context only in one meaning, the description is explicit.
