Several brief and seriously unclear thoughts on vagueness


"Several…more than two or three but fewer than many."
— Merriam-Webster

"How many things is a 'couple'?
— remembered radio show


I had a friend who, some years ago in the dark days before the mobile phone, tried to persuade me that the word "moment" was a Jewish measure of time, and of course with my classic British aplomb I put his idea down faster than you'd shoot a lame horse. "A moment is an undefinable measure of time", I might have said, "we do not expect it to be bounded or limited". Ye gods, I was a pillock. Because of course he was right. A moment was a unit of time¹. It wasn't a fixed thing like the second, rather it was one-fortieth of a solar hour (which in the days when time was measured by a sundial, varied from season to season).

For those interested in the Jewish time bit:

By Talmudic times, the Babylonian system of dividing up the day (from sunset to sunrise, and sunrise to sunset), into hours (Hebrew: שעה, sha'ah), parts (Hebrew: חלק, heleq, plural halaqim), and moments (Hebrew: רגע, rega, plural rega'im), had been adopted; the relationship of these units was:

1 part (heleq) = 76 moments (rega'im) (each moment, rega, is 0.04386 of a second; 22.8 rega'im is 1 second)
1 hour (sha'ah) = 1080 parts (halaqim) (each heleq is 3⅓ seconds)
1 day = 24 hours (sha'ah)

Wikipedia

We like to think of our thoughts and language as being precise, but we deceive ourselves. Our view of the world depends on our perception of it, and each of us has a different idea of what that means. Even colours, which we think of as being pretty much pinned down by wavelength, HTML codes, Pantone and such, are wildly interpreted.

Even Merriam-Webster has to remain vague when describing some words. When defining several it says "more than two or three but fewer than many", and they can't define an upper bound! "Many" is used as another vague cop-out because they don't want to start the argument about it being related to the number seven. In fact they are correct; in the etymology they say "…separalis, from Latin separ separate, back-formation from separare to separate".

The word "few" is similar. No-one can place a boundary around a number. Is few less than several? Who knows? And does anyone care? (Spoiler alert: yes.) But somehow we manage to use them, and at least amongst my mostly-English-speaking friends, we all generally manage to understand what we mean. "I'll just be a few minutes" being one of the exceptions to this; we all have that friend or family member for whom a few minutes can be half an hour. Oh, wait, there's also "It's just a few miles past the lightning-riven tree", which in my experience can be a trek of half-an-hour or more on some rotten trail in the hills. So other than those exceptions, we all know what they mean. Maybe.

(I just re-read that last paragraph and I recognise that I neglected something. "A few" and "The Few" are different. The latter, in my mind, is that number of pilots who really did save our assesarses in World War Two by their involvement in The Battle of Britain. Then, The Few And The Proud refers to the much greater, and probably uncountable, number in the US Marine Corps.)

As a child brought up mostly in or rubbing shoulders with the country, I was familiar with many other measurements. "A stone's throw" was easy. Everyone knew how far a stone could be thrown, though the measure was bigger for the big kids who were stronger and more practiced. It was within a range that you could imagine easily. "A bowshot" was already anachronostic, but clearly was a much longer distance. It was further away but still within walking distance.

Damn. "Walking distance" is really pretty damned ambiguous, and highly variable depending on how old one is, as well as where one was brought up. It seemed to be different in the city, though I was still happy to walk for the better part of an hour to get to town, and I have been known to walk across many city blocks to shop, get coffee or visit a friend. I have acquaintances who would climb into a car to pop out for milk when I'd have walked. Perhaps that's an American thing; the motor car culture took hold far earlier there than the UK (and possibly even Europe).

There are also cultural measures which defy definition. The country mile we've already alluded to—it's related to "a few miles" in which the mile is a stretchy beast. The New York Minute is something I cannot really parse or imagine. Jack defines it thus: "A New York Minute is a deeply psychological truth, a marriage of a person's patience with what's going through their heads." As a country boy I may have a different perception of time, but when I get to the city, waiting at a traffic light does make time telescope rather. Perhaps that's really the point.

Happen we don't want to get pinned down to accuracy, we like the vague, the mildly chaotic or even the Discordian. I find myself using words like "deci-fortnight" because they seem delightfully distant, and I can use them in a way that allows me to wriggle out if it's not really done whatever time I'd almost sort-of agreed.

There's a lot of this. In only a short while I've uncovered a good number and doubtless there are others I'd not thought of or even heard of. Feel free to let me know of any. I will give you due credit, and if you're ever close enough, your choice of coffee, tea or beer.

I suspect we sometimes enjoy the world being somewhat unbounded, uncountable and unclear. You can pry my vagueness from my cold, dead fingers.

 


 

Clockmaker calls into question the mathematics mentioned above. I'll poke around and sort it out in the daylight Meanwhile, thanks Clockmaker!

Please let me know of tyops or punctuation errots. I'm not just a bad typist and proofreader, but my aged laptop is in desperate need of replacement and I just can't do it just now. Perhaps in a few months. Thanks to avalyn I have a new laptop!



¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_(time)


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