Saturday, February 6, 2010

"I've never seen so much snow in my life."

Vague statements are generally unhelpful and convey little to no information. For example, by reading the title statement, we can infer that the speaker hasn't seen x amount of snow ever, in his lifetime. That's it. We can't determine how much snow he's actually seeing, unless we happen to be there with him at the time. We don't know his scale for comparing amounts of snow. For example, he might be from a tropical area that never snows, so now that he's experienced a snowy day, it automatically becomes the largest amount of snow that he's ever seen, regardless of the amount of snow being (relatively) large or small. However, based on movies, when someone utters this statement, it tends to be during times when there is a snowstorm or such, so that it tends to be snowing heavily at the time. So when the author is saying that he's "never seen so much snow in" his "life", he's implying that it's snowing pretty heavily. But since there's nothing to back up this claim, we can't determine how much snow he's seeing at the time.

1 comment:

  1. This was a really good example.I was really drawn to this blog because you choose a flashy title that really intrigued me. I think you did a really good job explaining your example. It is true that we really don’t know how much snow he is talking about because he may not have ever seen snow while the person he is talking to may have lived in the snow at one point or another.Anyway I just wanted to tell you that you did a great job coming up with a example that explained the rules just right. I look forward to reading more of your blogs.

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