Just saw a YouTube video where a guy took some wood ash, water, and a bunch of other common ingredients and made soap with it. That's cool and all, but then he said it was "chemical free".
Setting aside my typical argument about how a "chemical free" product is objective nonsense... my dude, you literally just made lye, which is a pretty harsh chemical.
James Endres Howell
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
Strypey
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •> Setting aside my typical argument about how a "chemical free" product is objective nonsense
... which would be willfully missing the point since there's an implied 'industrial', or maybe 'petroleum-derived', before any such usage of 'chemical'. As with software freedom, the point being local reproducibility. But I'm sure you knew that. Moving on ...
> you literally just made lye, which is a pretty harsh chemical
True that. Fight Club has a pretty good demonstration of just how harsh.
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Strypey • •@Strypey
The fact that you had to add "or maybe" demonstrstes my point there. I hate imprecise language. It causes unnecessary confusion, but I digress...
Strypey
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •> I hate imprecise language. It causes unnecessary confusion
Fair enough. But jargon is a standard feature of English. Many words and phrases have specific meanings in particular contexts. If the context is ignore, then a lot of language use will seem much more imprecise than it actually is.
Eg 'industrial' is commonly used as shorthand for 'powered by or derived from fossil fuels' in environmentalist discourse. Assuming a more general definition, prunes meaning from the discourse.
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Strypey
in reply to Strypey • • •This is one of the many reasons why the Titter-style microposting medium was probably a bad idea.
A group of people who are familiar with each other can use jargon terms in context, and add clarification when they know some participants are new to their specialist usage. When the potential reader is 'anyone', context collapse is inevitable.
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