Meaning, delivered.
Prose doesn’t carry fixed meaning on its own, whereas words have a defined meaning, of a sorts; it’s very recursive – words are defined with other words and there’s no ground truth in a dictionary.
But let’s just agree for the sake of argument that most people agree on the meaning of most words.
However when you string words together you create prose that has to be assessed, inferred and guessed at.
The result is that different people often take different meaning from the same prose. Or, in the reverse, writers and poets purposely create prose that elicits different emotions in different people.
If you want to take advantage of this subjectivity and you were, say, building an AI Q&A machine, then you’d choose a style of writing that carries more implied meaning than stated fact. More poetry and less politburo directives.
Machines don’t need to understand. They just need to sound like they might.
We humans learn this later on in our lives, when we’ve grown up; our parents start to annoy us just by being themselves.
What once passed unnoticed now grates. Their statements, their turns of phrase, their certainty. You see their delusional objectivity and realise it’s where yours comes from. It’s not flattering.
And now, when they speak, you hear it all; what they meant, what you thought they meant, and what you wish they hadn’t said.
Ambiguity, it turns out, is the cheapest form of intelligence.
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