I don’t have any big, epiphanic generalized advice, but one thing that feels pretty useful:
People in my experience are almost always willing to make one stretch, in a conversation, especially if it’s acknowledged as a stretch.
Like, if you ask them “okay, look, for the next five minutes, I’d like to use words in this particular way, and I get that you don’t want to use words that way in general and that makes sense, too, but if you could do me a favor …”
Usually, in my experience, people are open to those requests? So it boils down to something like, thinking strategically about which single discourse norm you’d find most useful, for which single five-minute chunk.
(This tends to have the benefit of making those groups more accustomed to receiving and granting small discourse requests in general, which is helpful for everybody.)
And you can, like, balance it out, too—you don’t always have to have the request be “more of a certain kind of rigor or precision.” Like, you can sometimes say “okay, I can’t express this in reasonable, fair words, so what I’d like to do is spew some unfair gunk and then go back afterward and cut out the parts I don’t endorse. Is that okay with you all? Like, can I just get the words out, first, and then we can go back and strike some of them?”
Another important piece of this puzzle in my experience is making such agreements with specific conversational partners. Like, if you’re on a Discord with 1000 people, it’s impossible to get them all to shift modes at once, but you can usually manage to do something like “Hey, username, can I try a different mode real quick?” and then either just don’t engage with other people butting in, or gently say “yeah, I’m doing a weird thing with username right now, scroll up for details” or whatever.
I don’t have any big, epiphanic generalized advice, but one thing that feels pretty useful:
People in my experience are almost always willing to make one stretch, in a conversation, especially if it’s acknowledged as a stretch.
Like, if you ask them “okay, look, for the next five minutes, I’d like to use words in this particular way, and I get that you don’t want to use words that way in general and that makes sense, too, but if you could do me a favor …”
Usually, in my experience, people are open to those requests? So it boils down to something like, thinking strategically about which single discourse norm you’d find most useful, for which single five-minute chunk.
(This tends to have the benefit of making those groups more accustomed to receiving and granting small discourse requests in general, which is helpful for everybody.)
And you can, like, balance it out, too—you don’t always have to have the request be “more of a certain kind of rigor or precision.” Like, you can sometimes say “okay, I can’t express this in reasonable, fair words, so what I’d like to do is spew some unfair gunk and then go back afterward and cut out the parts I don’t endorse. Is that okay with you all? Like, can I just get the words out, first, and then we can go back and strike some of them?”
Another important piece of this puzzle in my experience is making such agreements with specific conversational partners. Like, if you’re on a Discord with 1000 people, it’s impossible to get them all to shift modes at once, but you can usually manage to do something like “Hey, username, can I try a different mode real quick?” and then either just don’t engage with other people butting in, or gently say “yeah, I’m doing a weird thing with username right now, scroll up for details” or whatever.