Something every educated person should internalize is that a large fraction of statements by authority figures have no information content at all, but only seem like they must be important because ambiguous phrasing creates a false impression of profundity.
they want to convey that impression of life to you and make you have *roughly* that sense of things as well. "Love is just a word" seems like a perfectly good way to gesture in a direction like that. It's not an argument. But it's only very rarely that arguments are possible.
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It's a terrible form of communication even if it's common, because people often *think* they share some sort of common information after exchanging such phrases even though they've conveyed almost nothing at all.
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Don't you ever think associationally? This reminds me of that? Cluster thinking? That's how metaphor & rhetoric works. Doesn't follow syllogistic logic, does convey *some* info, and (importantly) is actually possible for the majority of situations where you do not have
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If I could only speak about things I knew for sure, I wouldn't be able to communicate about *most* things in my life! and already I can't communicate about most things, because almost everyone I know is as much of a prosy fact-obsessed stinker as you. :p
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That's not true. You can communicate about things that you don't understand well in a way that conveys that without resort to linguistic trickery. You don't lose the ability to communicate merely by trying to avoid phrases that only seem to convey meaning.
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