The problem is that the interpretation of nuance is a subjective and individual pursuit, and you'll rarely get any intelligent group of people to agree on which terms are loaded or slanted in certain ways, and which aren't. If that's true, and if we should only use dictionaries as a late resort, then it seems to me that you're saying that we should apply subjective judgment to most everything we do -- when it's clearly been established here that most copy editors (here at least) are most comfortable drawing between some deeply engraved lines based in long-established rules -- i.e., Strunk and White, various stylebooks, dictionaries, thesauruses, etc. (for what I think are often good reasons). I don't believe in hewing strictly to any style or guide, either, at the expense of any common-sense critical personal judgment ... but to endorse a more free-form approach to deciding what words mean in a common or popular connotative form seems to me to be a blueprint for lingusitic chaos in print.<p>That being said, I asked around my newsroom, and nobody here thinks "debris" has a overtly "junk" connotation. We'll keep using it.
|