Vague vague vague vague vague

I wrote this piece about a year ago, back when I was still at a state school — my first real attempt at writing critically about anything. Reading it now, the irony is rather hard to miss. I blamed everything on power. Everything. Now I look at the language surrounding AI, or the vocabulary that drifts out of Silicon Valley, and I can only marvel. The benefits of making language vague and expansive are, it turns out, considerable. Feel free to try it yourself.

At a recent grade-wide assembly, several students shared their experiences and study methods for the midterm exams. Listening carefully, I noticed a handful of phrases recurring throughout: improving accuracy, building a knowledge framework, making effective use of time, and so on. These expressions share a common trait — they state a position without offering any concrete path forward. Time constraints, perhaps, prevented the speakers from elaborating. Yet this epidemic of deliberate vagueness is worth a moment's reflection.

The phenomenon, I would argue, reflects something deeply structural in Chinese society: discretionary authority flowing from the top down. Classical Chinese was an extraordinarily compressed language — lean to the point of ambiguity, susceptible to wildly different interpretations depending on who happened to be holding the brush. Laws and regulations were written in it, which meant a villager's understanding of a given rule could differ entirely from a county magistrate's reading of the same characters. Convenient, that. This textual flexibility granted emperors — and their rather eager subordinates — something approaching unlimited power. The tradition has proved remarkably durable: terms like appropriate and suitable continue to populate official language today, performing the same useful function they always have.

Beyond its venerable institutional roots, vagueness persists for a more prosaic reason: broad language is simply harder to be caught out on. There is a Chinese saying — disaster comes from the mouth, illness enters through it. Whether writing, speaking, or arguing, sweeping generalities offer fewer handholds for criticism and demand considerably less cognitive effort to produce. A well-known Polandball comic captures the art form neatly: a figure stands at a podium and delivers, with great conviction, We must [four-character idiom] [four-character idiom] [four-character idiom].

In most everyday situations, imprecise language causes little harm. But when vague phrasing finds its way into rule-making, it invites divergent interpretations — and whoever holds the authority to interpret holds, by extension, rather a lot of everything else.

I should note, of course, that this short piece contains more than a few instances of the very thing it criticizes. Corrections are welcome.