Not sure I understand what you’re saying with the “tow the line” thing.
A lot of what you wrote seems like it’s gesturing towards an idea that I might call “buzzwords” or “marketing speak” or “the affect game”. I think of it as being when someone tries to control the valence of an idea by associating it with other ideas without invoking any actual model of how they’re connected. Like trying to sell a car by having a hot model stand next to it.
If that’s what you meant, then I agree this is kind of eerie and sort of anti-reality and I’m generally against it. (Let’s attach negative valence to it!)
But that wouldn’t be my first hypothesis (or my second) to explain what’s going on when someone writes “tow the line” instead of “toe the line”. My first hypothesis would be that they think of “toe the line” as an idiomatic phrase, in the sense that their mental dictionary has an explicit entry for the phrase-as-a-whole so they don’t need to construct the meaning out of the component words. It’s therefore easy to make a mistake regarding which words are in the phrase because they aren’t load-bearing. (This is also my guess about where phrases like “sooner than later” or “I could care less” come from, though I’ve never seriously researched them.)
This explanation sort of matches your description about how the words have died and aren’t being “loaded”, in the sense that the entire phrase has a meaning that’s not dependent on the individual words. But if you’re saying that putting idiomatic phrases into your mental dictionary is terrible, I disagree. I think idiomatic phrases are just compound words with spaces in them. I feel that understanding how the individual words contribute to the combined meaning is kind of like knowing the Latin roots of a word: preferable to not knowing, but hardly an essential skill for most people, and even if you know you probably don’t want to reconstruct the meaning from that knowledge every time you use it.
(My second hypothesis would be a simple spelling mistake. Misspelling homophones is not exactly unheard-of, although I don’t think toe/tow is one of the common ones.)
I’m not sure if you were trying to get at the first thing or the second thing or some other thing I haven’t thought of.
Not sure I understand what you’re saying with the “toe the line” thing.
The initial metaphor was ‘toe the line’ meaning to obey the rules, often reluctantly. Imagine a do-not-cross line drawn on the ground and a person coming so close to the line that their toe touched it, but not in fact crossing the line. To substitute “tow the line”, which has a completely different literal meaning, means that the person has failed to comprehend the metaphor, and has simply adopted the view that this random phrase has this specific meaning.
I don’t think aysja adopts the view that it’s terrible to put idiomatic phrases whole into your dictionary. But a person who replaces a meaningful specific metaphor with a similar but meaningless one is in some sense making less meaningful communication. (Note that this also holds if the person has correctly retained the phrase as ‘toe the line’ but has failed to comprehend the metaphor.)
aysja calls this failing to notice that words have referents, and I think that gets at the nature of the problem. These words are meant to point at a specific image, and in some people’s minds they point at a null instead. It’s not a big deal in this specific example, but a) some people seem to have an awful lot of null pointers and b) sometimes the words pointing at a null are actually important. For example, think of a scientist who can parrot that results should be ‘statistically significant’ but literally doesn’t understand the difference between doing one experiment and reporting the significance of the results, and doing 20 experiments and only reporting the one ‘significant’ result
Since two people have reacted saying that I missed your point (but not what point I missed), I’m rereading your comment and making another try at understanding it. I’m not making much progress on that, but your description of what “toe the line” means keeps bothering me. You said:
The initial metaphor was ‘toe the line’ meaning to obey the rules, often reluctantly. Imagine a do-not-cross line drawn on the ground and a person coming so close to the line that their toe touched it, but not in fact crossing the line.
If you’re trying to get someone not to cross a line, telling them that they should get as close as possible without crossing it seems pretty weird to me. Exhortations to follow the rules do not typically include an implication that you should get as close as possible to breaking them.
When I first inferred the phrase’s meaning from context (the usual way people learn most terms) and made an idle guess at its original metaphor, I guessed it had to do with soldiers lining up in formation, showing that they’re part of the superorganism and displaying that superorganism’s coordination to potential foes.
The most likely origin of the term goes back to the wooden decked ships of the Royal Navy during the late 17th or early 18th century. Barefooted seamen had to stand at attention for inspection and had to line up on deck along the seams of the wooden planks, hence to “toe the line”.
The page lists several other theories as to the origin of the phrase, and one of them (House of Commons) does actually involve some type of do-not-cross line—although that theory seems to have strong evidence against it and is presented as a common myth rather than a serious contender for the true origin.
You’re complaining about people who degrade our communication by not grasping the underlying metaphor, but your own guess at the underlying metaphor is probably wrong, and even historians who make a serious effort to figure this out can’t be sure they’ve got it right.
Do you still think your communication was better than the people who thought the line was being towed, and if so then what’s your evidence for that?
original poster johnswentsworth wrote a piece about people LARPing their jobs rather than attempting to build deeper understanding or models-with-gears
aysja added some discussion about people failing to notice that words have referents, as a further psychological exploration of the LARPing idea, and added tow/toe the line as a related phenomenon. They say “LARPing jobs is a bit eerie to me, too, in a similar way. It’s like people are towing the line instead of toeing it. Like they’re modeling what they’re “supposed” to be doing, or something, rather than doing it for reasons.”
You asked for further clarification
I tried using null pointers as an alternative metaphor to get at the same concept.
No one is debating the question of whether learning etymology of words is important and I’m not sure how you got hung up on that idea. And toe/tow the line is just an example of the problem of people failing to load the intended image/concept, while LARPing (and believing?) that they are in fact communicating in the same way as people who do.
When I asked for clarification (your number 3), I said here’s some things aysja might mean, if they mean thing A then I agree it’s bad but I don’t agree that “tow the line” is an example of the same phenomenon, if they mean thing B then I agree “tow the line” is an example but I don’t think it’s bad, is aysja saying A or B or something else?
You replied by focusing heavily on “tow the line” and how it demonstrates a lack of understanding and that’s bad, but not saying anything that appeared to argue with or contradict my explanation of this as an example of thing B, so I interpreted you as basically accepting my explanation that “towing the line” is an example of thing B and then trying to change my mind about whether thing B is bad.
Your summary of the conversation doesn’t even include the fact that I enumerated two different hypotheses so I’m guessing that the point at which we desynced was that those two hypotheses did not make the jump from my brain to yours?
Do you still think your communication was better than the people who thought the line was being towed, and if so then what’s your evidence for that?
We are way off topic, but I am actually going to say yes. If someone understands that English uses standing-on-the-right-side-of-a-line as a standard image for obeying rules, then they are also going to understand variants of the same idea. For example, “crossing a line” means breaking rules/norms to a degree that will not be tolerated, as does “stepping out of line”. A person who doesn’t grok that these are all referring to the same basic metaphor of do-not-cross-line=rule is either not going to understand the other expressions or is going to have to rote-learn them all separately. (And even after rote-learning, they will get confused by less common variants, like “setting foot over the line”.) And a person who uses tow not toe the line has obviously not grokked the basic metaphor.
My understanding of the etymology of “toe the line” is that it comes from the military—all the recuits in a group lining up , with their toes touching (but never over!) a line. Hence “I need you all to toe the line on this” means “do exactly this, with military precision”
If you’re using “null pointer” to describe the situation where a person knows what a phrase means but not the etymology that caused it to take on that meaning, then I think you should consider nearly everyone to have “null pointers” for nearly every word that they know. That’s the ordinary default way that people understand words.
You probably don’t know why words like “know” or “word” have the meaning that they have. You’d probably have a marginally more nuanced understanding of their meaning if you did. This does not make a practical difference for ordinary communication, and I would not advise most people to try to learn the etymologies for all words.
Not sure I understand what you’re saying with the “tow the line” thing.
A lot of what you wrote seems like it’s gesturing towards an idea that I might call “buzzwords” or “marketing speak” or “the affect game”. I think of it as being when someone tries to control the valence of an idea by associating it with other ideas without invoking any actual model of how they’re connected. Like trying to sell a car by having a hot model stand next to it.
If that’s what you meant, then I agree this is kind of eerie and sort of anti-reality and I’m generally against it. (Let’s attach negative valence to it!)
But that wouldn’t be my first hypothesis (or my second) to explain what’s going on when someone writes “tow the line” instead of “toe the line”. My first hypothesis would be that they think of “toe the line” as an idiomatic phrase, in the sense that their mental dictionary has an explicit entry for the phrase-as-a-whole so they don’t need to construct the meaning out of the component words. It’s therefore easy to make a mistake regarding which words are in the phrase because they aren’t load-bearing. (This is also my guess about where phrases like “sooner than later” or “I could care less” come from, though I’ve never seriously researched them.)
This explanation sort of matches your description about how the words have died and aren’t being “loaded”, in the sense that the entire phrase has a meaning that’s not dependent on the individual words. But if you’re saying that putting idiomatic phrases into your mental dictionary is terrible, I disagree. I think idiomatic phrases are just compound words with spaces in them. I feel that understanding how the individual words contribute to the combined meaning is kind of like knowing the Latin roots of a word: preferable to not knowing, but hardly an essential skill for most people, and even if you know you probably don’t want to reconstruct the meaning from that knowledge every time you use it.
(My second hypothesis would be a simple spelling mistake. Misspelling homophones is not exactly unheard-of, although I don’t think toe/tow is one of the common ones.)
I’m not sure if you were trying to get at the first thing or the second thing or some other thing I haven’t thought of.
The initial metaphor was ‘toe the line’ meaning to obey the rules, often reluctantly. Imagine a do-not-cross line drawn on the ground and a person coming so close to the line that their toe touched it, but not in fact crossing the line. To substitute “tow the line”, which has a completely different literal meaning, means that the person has failed to comprehend the metaphor, and has simply adopted the view that this random phrase has this specific meaning.
I don’t think aysja adopts the view that it’s terrible to put idiomatic phrases whole into your dictionary. But a person who replaces a meaningful specific metaphor with a similar but meaningless one is in some sense making less meaningful communication. (Note that this also holds if the person has correctly retained the phrase as ‘toe the line’ but has failed to comprehend the metaphor.)
aysja calls this failing to notice that words have referents, and I think that gets at the nature of the problem. These words are meant to point at a specific image, and in some people’s minds they point at a null instead. It’s not a big deal in this specific example, but a) some people seem to have an awful lot of null pointers and b) sometimes the words pointing at a null are actually important. For example, think of a scientist who can parrot that results should be ‘statistically significant’ but literally doesn’t understand the difference between doing one experiment and reporting the significance of the results, and doing 20 experiments and only reporting the one ‘significant’ result
Since two people have reacted saying that I missed your point (but not what point I missed), I’m rereading your comment and making another try at understanding it. I’m not making much progress on that, but your description of what “toe the line” means keeps bothering me. You said:
If you’re trying to get someone not to cross a line, telling them that they should get as close as possible without crossing it seems pretty weird to me. Exhortations to follow the rules do not typically include an implication that you should get as close as possible to breaking them.
When I first inferred the phrase’s meaning from context (the usual way people learn most terms) and made an idle guess at its original metaphor, I guessed it had to do with soldiers lining up in formation, showing that they’re part of the superorganism and displaying that superorganism’s coordination to potential foes.
So I checked Wikipedia...
The page lists several other theories as to the origin of the phrase, and one of them (House of Commons) does actually involve some type of do-not-cross line—although that theory seems to have strong evidence against it and is presented as a common myth rather than a serious contender for the true origin.
You’re complaining about people who degrade our communication by not grasping the underlying metaphor, but your own guess at the underlying metaphor is probably wrong, and even historians who make a serious effort to figure this out can’t be sure they’ve got it right.
Do you still think your communication was better than the people who thought the line was being towed, and if so then what’s your evidence for that?
To recap:
original poster johnswentsworth wrote a piece about people LARPing their jobs rather than attempting to build deeper understanding or models-with-gears
aysja added some discussion about people failing to notice that words have referents, as a further psychological exploration of the LARPing idea, and added tow/toe the line as a related phenomenon. They say “LARPing jobs is a bit eerie to me, too, in a similar way. It’s like people are towing the line instead of toeing it. Like they’re modeling what they’re “supposed” to be doing, or something, rather than doing it for reasons.”
You asked for further clarification
I tried using null pointers as an alternative metaphor to get at the same concept.
No one is debating the question of whether learning etymology of words is important and I’m not sure how you got hung up on that idea. And toe/tow the line is just an example of the problem of people failing to load the intended image/concept, while LARPing (and believing?) that they are in fact communicating in the same way as people who do.
Does that help?
When I asked for clarification (your number 3), I said here’s some things aysja might mean, if they mean thing A then I agree it’s bad but I don’t agree that “tow the line” is an example of the same phenomenon, if they mean thing B then I agree “tow the line” is an example but I don’t think it’s bad, is aysja saying A or B or something else?
You replied by focusing heavily on “tow the line” and how it demonstrates a lack of understanding and that’s bad, but not saying anything that appeared to argue with or contradict my explanation of this as an example of thing B, so I interpreted you as basically accepting my explanation that “towing the line” is an example of thing B and then trying to change my mind about whether thing B is bad.
Your summary of the conversation doesn’t even include the fact that I enumerated two different hypotheses so I’m guessing that the point at which we desynced was that those two hypotheses did not make the jump from my brain to yours?
We are way off topic, but I am actually going to say yes. If someone understands that English uses standing-on-the-right-side-of-a-line as a standard image for obeying rules, then they are also going to understand variants of the same idea. For example, “crossing a line” means breaking rules/norms to a degree that will not be tolerated, as does “stepping out of line”. A person who doesn’t grok that these are all referring to the same basic metaphor of do-not-cross-line=rule is either not going to understand the other expressions or is going to have to rote-learn them all separately. (And even after rote-learning, they will get confused by less common variants, like “setting foot over the line”.) And a person who uses tow not toe the line has obviously not grokked the basic metaphor.
I thought I just established that “toeing the line” is not referring to the same basic metaphor as “crossing a line”.
My understanding of the etymology of “toe the line” is that it comes from the military—all the recuits in a group lining up , with their toes touching (but never over!) a line. Hence “I need you all to toe the line on this” means “do exactly this, with military precision”
Yes. (Which is very different from “stay out of this one forbidden zone, while otherwise doing whatever you want.”)
If you’re using “null pointer” to describe the situation where a person knows what a phrase means but not the etymology that caused it to take on that meaning, then I think you should consider nearly everyone to have “null pointers” for nearly every word that they know. That’s the ordinary default way that people understand words.
You probably don’t know why words like “know” or “word” have the meaning that they have. You’d probably have a marginally more nuanced understanding of their meaning if you did. This does not make a practical difference for ordinary communication, and I would not advise most people to try to learn the etymologies for all words.