Thread:User talk:Armondikov/Language sucks/reply (16)

Come to think of good communication, I realise I'm more thrown by odd word stresses than I am by bad grammar or pronunciation or spelling. Well, unless it's a Stephenie Meyer style clusterfuck of English that's not only an insult to grammar but to human comprehension. Generally poor grammar or punctuation don't affect meaning too much (again, I think that language pedants who focus on this are to blame for people arguing from semantics all the time and thinking they're clever) but when you stress a word in speech you are altering the meaning - particularly we're trying to get across your punctuation because we know that there is another sentence in this paragraph, but if I was speaking you wouldn't know. On an information level, the words are the same, but on an implication level.

Like, in The Matrix when Cypher says the "images work for the construct program". This has always bugged the crap out of me. He means that the "images work for the construct program" but not the Matrix itself. But somehow it implies something else. Watch it, it's really weird.