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Thanks for posting this and defending it for me because I was going to post pretty much the same thing. I'm not a fan of when someone takes a term with a vague but widely understood meaning and then creates a very specific definition and uses the term as if that's the real definition. Academics do this a lot, but I'm afraid you did this yourself a while back with your precise definition of tackiness. I realized that throughout the rest of that thread I was very careful to use alternate language whenever I was tempted to say tacky in a context that didn't fit your definition, which made me realize that, as fun as your definition was, it didn't really reflect how people talk in real life.
Anyway, I think the rule should be that if the people using the term can't tell you what they mean by it exactly, it means nothing. It may make people feel smart to come up with a hyper-specific definition of LARP but then they just find the general public using the expression the way they want. So it's pointless.
On the one hand I'm flattered anyone remembers my writing.
On the other, this comment really makes me step back, in that I had a lot of fun writing out an elaborate definition of tacky, and thought I was doing so in good fun towards an enlightening descriptive view of reality; when apparently an intelligent reader would interpret the comment as a proscriptive definition.
Raising the questions: Am I bad writer? Or are the people I think are using too elaborate definitions also just having fun and hanging out?
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