What does it mean when someone responds or replies in an elliptical or orthogonal way?
from cheese_greater@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca on 04 Jun 06:26
https://lemmy.world/post/47737053

Someone was very lightly chiding me for saying Shia Leboef looked a very hard 39 remarking that they were 38 and it reflected badly on them.

Then I replied Shia sort of resembled Hunter Biden…

I cant trace my mental stack that led to that formulation

#nostupidquestions

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RegularJoe@lemmy.world on 04 Jun 06:32 next collapse

An elliptical response is a concise utterance that omits words or phrases that are already understood from the context. It relies on the listener or reader to fill in the missing information.

exercisepick.com/what-are-elliptical-responses/

I’m not sure about orthogonal responses.

cheese_greater@lemmy.world on 04 Jun 06:42 collapse

I thought it was more eccentric but elliptical is something else i prefer to do to boil down a more complex response’s points inwant based on that so good to know 😬

lath@piefed.social on 04 Jun 06:36 next collapse

In this case it might mean they’ve been consuming too much media and need to chill.

cheese_greater@lemmy.world on 04 Jun 06:45 collapse

What if all those things are synonamous?

lvxferre@mander.xyz on 04 Jun 13:27 collapse

Elliptical answers (where most stuff is clipped, except a few words) usually mean what you’d expect, with the omitted info being usually inferrable by context.

  • [Alice] Hey Bob, did you see my notebook?
  • [Bob] Over the desk.

The full answer would be “Yes, I saw your notebook. It is over the desk”. That’s only implied, by Bob mentioning the location; not explicitly said. But Alice can easily infer “this is the location of the notebook”, and that if Bob knows its location then yes, he saw it.

This pops up due to the co-operative principle, specially the maxims of relevance and clarity.

Now, orthogonal answers (where the “answer” doesn’t answer the question, like in your example) are a bloody mess. I think they’re mostly caused by a mismatch between context (shared by the participants of the conversation) vs. individual info (exclusive to one of the participants). I could see them happening fairly often in the situation from your example, where the “individual info” is the strain of thought one of the participants followed.

[Warning: take this with a grain of salt, this has a sample size of one] I’m also predicting they happen fairly often when one (but not both) of the speech participants is autistic. Autists in general don’t rely as much on implicatures as neurotypical people do, so one side starts seeing implicatures where there’s none, and the other doesn’t catch them up. Re-using that example above:

  • [Alice] Hey Bob, did you see my notebook? (implied: “please, where’s my notebook?”)
  • [Bob, autistic] Yes, I did. (Alice’s implicature was not addressed, so Bob answered her question literally.)

From personal experience, it drives both sides of the conversation crazy, until they backtrack to re-find the context. It helps a bit if you know the other side is autistic, though. (Sorry, I felt like rambling about this. It happened with me today.)