Vague language is often the result of vague thinking; most people do not actually try to be specific in their thinking; many of them don’t know how.
Vague language will also arise when language doesn’t correctly encapsulate a concept, or when the writer doesn’t know how to use language for that specific purpose; pointing more specifically at the wrong thing is being actively misleading. Thus vague language can often occur in areas where there isn’t a common and codified way of expressing specific thoughts. For example, this post is vague about what vague language is; the specific concept is one I suspect you’ve never had to specify, so it’s hard to translate it into words. Instead you focus on what it isn’t, trying to be specific by ruling out, rather than ruling in.
Vague language can also arise in areas where the common communication mechanism is necessarily lossy, such as when talking about qualia.
I think “deliberate” is doing most of the heavy lifting in this post.
I was just reading that essay. I ripped the examples of modern art and literary theory straight from it.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they do not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader.
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The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.
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Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
―Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
Vague language is often the result of vague thinking; most people do not actually try to be specific in their thinking; many of them don’t know how.
Vague language will also arise when language doesn’t correctly encapsulate a concept, or when the writer doesn’t know how to use language for that specific purpose; pointing more specifically at the wrong thing is being actively misleading. Thus vague language can often occur in areas where there isn’t a common and codified way of expressing specific thoughts. For example, this post is vague about what vague language is; the specific concept is one I suspect you’ve never had to specify, so it’s hard to translate it into words. Instead you focus on what it isn’t, trying to be specific by ruling out, rather than ruling in.
Vague language can also arise in areas where the common communication mechanism is necessarily lossy, such as when talking about qualia.
I think “deliberate” is doing most of the heavy lifting in this post.
On this topic, Orwell has a very good essay “Politics and the English language” (https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/) which is kind of about this.
I was just reading that essay. I ripped the examples of modern art and literary theory straight from it.