I’m sure you have been in this situation: You want to say something, but it doesn’t sound right. So you reword it in a way that
gets the point across,
you feel better about saying and
is strangely worded.
So you say it. This is very common. But why say it so oddly? Is it because you wanted to be really precise? Yes, sometimes, but mostly not, I think. Are you really struggling to say exactly what you mean, or are you just struggling to bypass your intuition that you shouldn’t say it at all? Some illustrations:
ChatGPT jailbreak
Someone asks ChatGPT to do something. “As a large language model, I cannot do so and so.” Then they reword it or try to gaslight it into thinking that it can. And it turns out that it can sort of do it after all. It’s just that the developers didn’t want it to happen.
Foreign lyrics
Do foreign lyrics sound less cringey or are your cringe detection systems underdeveloped for the foreign language in question because of your lack of fluency?
Walter White
There are many tense situations in Breaking Bad. Sometimes, the protagonist, Walter White, sees his life is at risk. Whenever feels anxious or threatened, he wants to solve everything by talking and talking. As he himself says:
but she just won’t… she just won’t understand. I mean, no matter how well I explain it, these days she just has this… this… I mean, I truly believe there exists some combination of words. There must exist certain words in a certain specific order that can explain all of this, but with her I just can’t ever seem to find them.
In conclusion, I want to say that speaking off-meta is often counterproductive. You might have managed to feel good about saying it right now, but your knee-jerk responses are sometimes wiser than you can see while deliberating what to say right now. You have only an instant to decide what to say, but the other person has the rest of their life to see the evil or disease in your soul that caused you to say what you said (as long as they can remember that you said it). So, in the long-term, you don’t even save face, you just fool yourself.
However I’m still not sure if there is some real use for it that I’m overlooking. Maybe there are some situations when it’s enough to sound ok at the moment? I don’t know. What do you think?
Speaking off-meta
I’m sure you have been in this situation:
You want to say something, but it doesn’t sound right. So you reword it in a way that
gets the point across,
you feel better about saying and
is strangely worded.
So you say it.
This is very common.
But why say it so oddly?
Is it because you wanted to be really precise? Yes, sometimes, but mostly not, I think.
Are you really struggling to say exactly what you mean, or are you just struggling to bypass your intuition that you shouldn’t say it at all?
Some illustrations:
ChatGPT jailbreak
Someone asks ChatGPT to do something. “As a large language model, I cannot do so and so.”
Then they reword it or try to gaslight it into thinking that it can.
And it turns out that it can sort of do it after all. It’s just that the developers didn’t want it to happen.
Foreign lyrics
Do foreign lyrics sound less cringey or are your cringe detection systems underdeveloped for the foreign language in question because of your lack of fluency?
Walter White
There are many tense situations in Breaking Bad. Sometimes, the protagonist, Walter White, sees his life is at risk. Whenever feels anxious or threatened, he wants to solve everything by talking and talking. As he himself says:
In conclusion, I want to say that speaking off-meta is often counterproductive.
You might have managed to feel good about saying it right now, but your knee-jerk responses are sometimes wiser than you can see while deliberating what to say right now. You have only an instant to decide what to say, but the other person has the rest of their life to see the evil or disease in your soul that caused you to say what you said (as long as they can remember that you said it). So, in the long-term, you don’t even save face, you just fool yourself.
However I’m still not sure if there is some real use for it that I’m overlooking. Maybe there are some situations when it’s enough to sound ok at the moment? I don’t know. What do you think?