Hacker News Reader

Comment by slig | Hacker News Reader

List of absolutist words:

    absolutely
    all
    always
    complete
    completely
    constant
    constantly
    definitely
    entire
    ever
    every
    everyone
    everything
    full
    must
    never
    nothing
    totally
    whole

View on HN

Is it just me, or has "definitely" become sort of subtly indefinite in modern language? Consider:

    A) We should throw a party for him.
    B) We should definitely throw a party for him.

    A) We should get together soon.
    B) We should definitely get together soon.

In each case, it seems like A is a call to action, whereas B is (for lack of a better term) more of a social expression which doesn't necessitate actually planning something right this moment. Or maybe I'm overthinking it.

literally

they used a panel of judges to determine whether a word counted as "absolutist" or not, the results of which look at least partly arbitrary to me. Apparently "really" and "anything" did not count as absolutist but "definitely" did.

Yeah, I think the authors should definitely consider this.

Just these two work pretty well as a short list: "Always", "Never".

I wonder how/if they accounted for "almost always", "almost never" etc.

I think that is the point. Hedge words show that you are aware and accepting that everything/everyone is not out to get you.

Lot of these words are spoken by politicians to demand authority recognition.

Can we say politicians therefore exploit the anxiety of the population through absolutism?

I just did a quick grep in a set of Speeches by two different politicians (about 20,000 words each):

    #Pol    #<absolutely|all|always|...>/#<words>
    Trump     0.013
    Obama     0.004
    Congress  0.011
    HN        0.017

Yeah, I threw in a few Hacker News comment pages (not including this one).

So, I'm questioning your assumptions...

Yah that's about right. Thanks for this data. I would expect some positivity from politicians compared to HN nerds.

BTW this really shows how awful Trump is.

Is this the entire list of 'absolutist' words?

A. It seems very small. B. I'm assuming a lot of research went into choosing that list, I guess I'll have to search for how that works haha.

The entire list of words used on this specific paper. I just copied/pasted from the PDF here.

They describe the methods for making this set. No, it’s not all. They used their team to brainstorm absolute and non, whittled it down to 65, then these 19.

They narrowed their list down to those that appear above some frequency.

I used most of these in an application's personal statement to a program at an internationally leading university…

Don't forget "nobody."

> Nobody builds walls like I do.

all, constant/ly, nothing are notably common in any workplace. Wait, "any" isn't in there? I'm not hype about this study.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com