>Capitalization is generally inconsequential and should not be used to infer that it's a term of art
I disagree. And my counterargument is going to make me sip a lot of air through my teeth because I don’t like it. The capitalization thing is an Agoran slang/tradition/cultural thing (yuck, uuuhggghh). It’s a huge pity that it’s not obvious without being familiar with the culture, but capitalizing to denote a term of art is frequent and ubiquitous enough that I believe that it should be interpreted as such, because of “game custom” (R217). Agora doesn’t have an official language either, and the ruleset could’ve been written in a conlang that looks like English but has a totally different meaning for all I know, even if it “looks” like English. Overly paranoid Evil Genius style arguments aside, currently, Agora doesn’t even use standard English in the first place lol, because of the presence of Spivak. I argue that Agora is written in an Agora-dialect English. And in that, capitalization does denote terms of art. On Wed, 20 Feb 2019 at 05:12, ais...@alumni.bham.ac.uk < ais...@alumni.bham.ac.uk> wrote: > On Wed, 2019-02-20 at 03:56 +0000, James Cook wrote: > > Apathy. I specify Falsifian and G. > > > > I initiate a Call for Judgement, specifying the statement: "Falsifian > > and G won the game." > > > > Here are our arguments: > > > > 1. I "published", or "announced", the following: "Apathy", in this > > message. (I also sent a separate message that just says "Apathy", > > in case anyone insists it has to be by itself in a message for > > me to "publish" it.) > > Arguments: Declaring Apathy is not the same thing linguistically as > declaring "Apathy", much the same way as sending a message with text > "the Herald's Report" is not the same thing as publishing the Herald's > Report. There's a use/mention distinction issue here. > > If a scam along these lines worked, the required declaration would have > to express apathy the concept, not "apathy" the word. Something like "I > am apathetic." might potentially work, but it's a bit of a stretch. > > -- > ais523 > >
