…nor in phrase-space for that matter.
In You don’t literally have to I mentioned how in a sense we of course don’t have to, since we don’t have to do anything. Unless we care about an outcome, in which case we have to do it to achieve it.
This pattern kept coming up and seems bad: start scrutinizing a word and expanding or contracting its meaning until it’s empty of meaning, then declaring it pointless.
If we expand a word/phrase to include everything then this is pointless. We already have a word to cover the concept of “everything”. Same for if we contract a word’s/phrase’s meaning so much that it stops pointing at anything, then the word also becomes meaningless.
But now we have a word/phrase that either points to EVERYTHING THERE IS, or to nothing at all, which in either case doesn’t transmit information. In a sense we have an empty word now with no meaningful reference.
But words are kinda hard to create in that they have to spread wide enough to be useful shorthands, so if this one already exists we might as well have it point at smth.
Which brings us back to the already common meaning it has, which is the obvious candidate as consensus on meaning already exists. Which is to say: if there’s a word/phrase that under scrutiny looks strange, but this just causes it to mean everything or nothing, then the scrutiny might have gone too far or misapplied.
Related: Obvious… to me