• Pheonixtail@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If you want to dive into that sort of thing i recomend looking into social constructivist theory, nuts to realise just how much of everything we live our lives by is really a product of people agreeing to do so rather than any struct objective measure.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The only reason the sequence of symbols you wrote say what you wanted to say is because we all agree on what it says.

  • zephyr@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The only reason you’re talking, is that we all agree what each word means.

    • emptyother@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It is neat seeing our agreement on these words change over time. And seeing a few people complaining about words not being used in its original meaning, thinking language is static. And cursewords going from taboo to common usage.

      Did you know shark (most likely) comes from the dutch word schurk (meaning bad guy/villain/scoundrel)? Which is where Loan Shark comes from, not from the fish. And the fish was called Haye or Dogfish? At some point the english speaking people decided that the fish should be called “bad guys”. Meanwhile, here in Norway we kept both the words “skurk” and “hai” from the dutch, in its original meaning.

      I wish I found this so fascinating back when I was still in school and could have taken that path.

  • Ech@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Depends on how we’re framing it. We agreed on names of days and lengths of weeks based on our culture and tradition, but that’s not really what today “is”, though. What it “is” is the 171st rotation in the current revolution around the sun. No need to agree on anything there. That just is what it is.