It's not that I forgot the audience (that's an important part of rhetoric, and has been for 1000s of years, e.g., Cicero's De Oratore makes the point); it is just that I don't care in this case about hooking the audience. I only wanted to point out the nature of stipulative definitions. I wrote not to entertain or market,
If people are not interested in looking up the meaning of words they don't know or to follow the details either due to a lack of time, will or intellect, it is their prerogative to remain amongst the οἱ πολλοί. I wrote not to entertain or market.
But I suppose it is that attitude that is part of the reason why SCUBA course content has declined, been truncated or simplified and the books written at a grade 5 or 6 reading level littered with 'and/or': many people care not for complexity, for the subtle understanding fine distinctions enable, neither for the aesthetics of knowledge, but only for the easy, the immediate and what is of short term utility sweetly packaged as info- or edutainment.
I shall, therefore, lower my expectations; but not my standards.
p.s.: why are PADI books littered with 'and/or' (I saw it several times in the Nitrox course book)? I asked my instructor about this but I don't think he understood the point. Does PADI proofread? 'And' means both are necessary while 'or' means one is sufficient. Of course, 'or' is also inclusive so the 'and' is redundant; and if the 'or' is read exclusively then 'and/or' is inconsistent. 'And/or' is a logical monstrosity:
"In a Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion from 1935, Justice Fowler referred to it as "that befuddling, nameless thing, that Janus-faced verbal monstrosity, neither word nor phrase, the child of a brain of someone too lazy or too dull to know what he did mean." The Kentucky Supreme Court has said it was a "much-condemned conjunctive-disjunctive crutch of sloppy thinkers." Finally, the Florida Supreme Court has held that use of and/or [in a contract] results in a nullity, stating
. . . we take our position with that distinguished company of lawyers who have condemned its use. It is one of those inexcusable barbarisms which were sired by indolence and damned by indifference, and has no more place in legal terminology than the vernacular of Uncle Remus has in Holy Writ. I am unable to divine how such senseless jargon becomes current. The coiner of it certainly had no appreciation for terse and concise law English."
One would think with PADI's money they could hire a better writer. And I would think that given the amount of money needed to be spent to meet all the conditions for PADI MSD PADI would just toss in the card for free.
MT