For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don’t want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That’s ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use “less” when they should use “fewer”

    • wjrii@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Psycholinguisitics understands this effect. The “wrong” word is increasing cognitive load and slowing down the listener’s comprehension. The exact same thing happens when pronoun use is unclear and a person has to parse the most likely referent from context.

      Language, especially English, is not computer code but leveraging the existing “libraries” of meaning and declaring variables carefully is usually very useful.

    • tourist@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      taxonomy

      shit

      Is that the right word

      I’ve been using “ontology” when talking about item classification to sound smart

      I guess it worked bc no one said “You mean taxonomy, right?” yet. My illusion of pretending I’m not a dumbass to people IRL isn’t broken yet I hope.