There are word pairs where there are distinctions that seem unimportant to me (less vs. fewer, comprise vs. compose, etc.) and then other where they do seem important to me (a marginal case on this side of the divide is that vs. which), and if someone is conflating the two it seems like to right move is to complain “hey, I was using that distinction!”
I suppose the annoyance I’m trying to point at is something like, “Hey, I was reserving those words for momentary distinctions!” To give a programming analogy, it’s like a library which clutters up the global namespace with a lot of function names like “insert” which you just know are going to conflict with something else (especially in a language which doesn’t make this easy to handle).
For example, if I define “knowledge vs wisdom” in a way that’s useful to the argument I’m going to make, and someone objects because my definitions seem too nonstandard, I would hope that they’re suggesting better words to fit my distinction as opposed to “knowledge vs wisdom”, rather than better definitions for knowledge and wisdom. Unless they already understand the argument I’m going to make and are trying to improve it, the second seems far less likely to move the conversation in a useful direction.
I suppose the annoyance I’m trying to point at is something like, “Hey, I was reserving those words for momentary distinctions!” To give a programming analogy, it’s like a library which clutters up the global namespace with a lot of function names like “insert” which you just know are going to conflict with something else (especially in a language which doesn’t make this easy to handle).
For example, if I define “knowledge vs wisdom” in a way that’s useful to the argument I’m going to make, and someone objects because my definitions seem too nonstandard, I would hope that they’re suggesting better words to fit my distinction as opposed to “knowledge vs wisdom”, rather than better definitions for knowledge and wisdom. Unless they already understand the argument I’m going to make and are trying to improve it, the second seems far less likely to move the conversation in a useful direction.