{"id":3309,"date":"2021-02-04T01:54:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T06:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=3309"},"modified":"2020-12-29T08:06:38","modified_gmt":"2020-12-29T13:06:38","slug":"figuratively-and-literally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2021\/02\/figuratively-and-literally\/","title":{"rendered":"Figuratively and Literally"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>We often use a &#8220;figure of speech&#8221; to describe something. Well, that&#8217;s nice, but I know that such-and-such cannot literally do something-or-other. Can we please have some literal descriptions?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I have recently been reading constantly about a very popular software app. I won&#8217;t mention which one because that would take us off the topic of figurative and literal descriptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All the descriptions of this very popular software app use figures of speech. An example figure of speech is, \u201cThis software manages that thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, no it doesn\u2019t. People manage things. Sometimes people write software to help them manage things. The software does some specific tasks that help the people do their job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Those specific tasks can be described literally. Please speak literally instead of figuratively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For example, this piece of software <em>appears<\/em> to manage things and actually helps <em>me<\/em> manage things when it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>reads parameters that I entered in a text file<\/li><li>reads status from a text file<\/li><li>uses if\u2026then statements that use the parameters and the status<\/li><li>calls control routines based on the if\u2026then statements<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Why don&#8217;t we have more literal descriptions? I believe the answer is that it is more difficult to understand something well enough in context to describe it literally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s simply harder. Fatigue always wins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Oh, thank you for the effort required to describe something literally. Now I understand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips We often use a &#8220;figure of speech&#8221; to describe something. Well, that&#8217;s nice, but I know that such-and-such cannot literally do something-or-other. Can we please have some literal descriptions? I have recently been reading constantly about a very popular software app. I won&#8217;t mention which one because that would take us off [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,353,3,67,5],"tags":[154,355,126,187,128],"class_list":["post-3309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-fairy-tales","category-technology","category-work","category-writing","tag-communication","tag-fairy-tales","tag-technology","tag-work","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3310,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3309\/revisions\/3310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}