A few speculative explanations for lower functional achievement rates on dating sites

If you are "fun-loving, love to laugh and travel", your homologation reduces the diagnostic value on a dating site. IOW, you just sound like the ordinary Tom, Dick and Harry which probably leads to a left-swipe.

Self-presentation and impressions of personality through text-based online dating profiles: A lens model analysis

In online dating, the self-authored profile serves as the primary way for daters to introduce themselves to others and to learn more about potential partners. However, few studies have examined the extent to which daters’ self-authored profile content is consistent with the impressions that others actually form. Using the meaning extraction method, we analyzed 190 profiles. Consistent with the lexical approach to personality, daters were able to encode aspects of themselves through linguistic self-description, and observers were able to decode profile information to form impressions. However, there were few significant associations between a dater’s self-presentation and observers’ judgments. 

The two categories most strongly associated with senders’ encoded personality traits were spending time with others and life aspirations. We offer a few speculative explanations for these lower functional achievement rates: on the senders’ side, dating sites may encourage “formulaic” profile responses, thus reducing the diagnostic value of words and phrases as they appear too often, and can subsequently lead observers to perceive that a profile is too stereotyped. Daters’ dissatisfaction with the homologation of profiles has been documented “‘Everyone’s always fun-loving, loves to laugh, loves to travel, um, loves to hang out with friends, loves to watch Netflix or go out to the bar.” Thus, the standardized nature of online dating profile self-description may be too generic to accurately reflect underlying personality traits.

Who decides what words mean

Good article on AEON by an ECONOMIST language columnist and editor about changes and development of languages and their grammar. Language is self-regulating.

Language changes all the time. Some changes really are chaotic, and disruptive. Take decimate, a prescriptivist shibboleth. It comes from the old Roman practice of punishing a mutinous legion by killing every 10th soldier (hence that deci­- root). Now we don’t often need a word for destroying exactly a 10th of something – this is the ‘etymological fallacy’, the idea that a word must mean exactly what its component roots indicate. But it is useful to have a word that means to destroy a sizeable proportion of something. Yet many people have extended the meaning of decimate until now it means something approaching ‘to wipe out utterly’.

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There is another fact to bear in mind: no language has fallen apart from lack of care. It is just not something that happens – literally. Prescriptivists cannot point to a single language that became unusable or inexpressive as a result of people’s failure to uphold traditional vocabulary and grammar. Every language existing today is fantastically expressive. It would be a miracle, except that it is utterly commonplace, a fact shared not only by all languages but by all the humans who use them.

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The leap from ‘obedient’ to ‘busty’ seems extraordinary until we look at it step by step. Nice used to mean ‘foolish’. Silly used to mean ‘holy’. Assassin is from the plural of the Arabic word for ‘hashish(-eater)’, and magazine from the Arabic word for a storehouse. This is just what words do. Prestigious used to be pejorative, meaning glittery but not substantive. These kinds of changes are common.

Who decides what words mean

Language as a self-regulating system

"THE AWFUL GERMAN LANGUAGE”

"An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten-parts of speech—not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary—six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam—that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which re-enclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens; finally, all the parentheses and re-parentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it—after which comes the verb, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about…”

Mark Twain, “THE AWFUL GERMAN LANGUAGE”

Why 'piss' is ruder than 'pee'?

Could be of particular interest to ze Germans with their hate speech mania.

Abstract

Most language users agree that some words sound harsh (e.g. grotesque) whereas others sound soft and pleasing (e.g. lagoon). While this prominent feature of human language has always been creatively deployed in art and poetry, it is still largely unknown whether the sound of a word in itself makes any contribution to the word’s meaning as perceived and interpreted by the listener. In a large-scale lexicon analysis, we focused on the affective substrates of words’ meaning (i.e. affective meaning) and words’ sound (i.e. affective sound); both being measured on a two-dimensional space of valence (ranging from pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (ranging from calm to excited). We tested the hypothesis that the sound of a word possesses affective iconic characteristics that can implicitly influence listeners when evaluating the affective meaning of that word. The results show that a significant portion of the variance in affective meaning ratings of printed words depends on a number of spectral and temporal acoustic features extracted from these words after converting them to their spoken form (study1). In order to test the affective nature of this effect, we independently assessed the affective sound of these words using two different methods: through direct rating (study2a), and through acoustic models that we implemented based on pseudoword materials (study2b). In line with our hypothesis, the estimated contribution of words’ sound to ratings of words’ affective meaning was indeed associated with the affective sound of these words; with a stronger effect for arousal than for valence. Further analyses revealed crucial phonetic features potentially causing the effect of sound on meaning: For instance, words with short vowels, voiceless consonants, and hissing sibilants (as in ‘piss’) feel more arousing and negative. Our findings suggest that the process of meaning making is not solely determined by arbitrary mappings between formal aspects of words and concepts they refer to. Rather, even in silent reading, words’ acoustic profiles provide affective perceptual cues that language users may implicitly use to construct words’ overall meaning.

Right here