False dichotomy. Words and meanings are socially negotiated. While there may indeed be expressive vs technical language, you cannot make the claim of being more precise.

I don't think I said I was more precise, but I guess that is what I meant. Nor did I say that there were only two ways to communicate. I said "more emotional" or "more technical" - lots of room between the extremes. Sure, I guess you could find the mid point then declare that there are only two sides. Like saying that some people are more short and some are more tall. We know that the world consists of more than just short or tall people.

As you noted there is "technical" language, where words have very defined meanings. Law, medicine and science are good examples. My initial response was regarding something technical in nature so to say "several" where only "two" was correct prompted me to make a clarification/correction. In this case I will claim to be more precise.

I think Robot was trying to suggest that precision can't necessarily be applicable where use dictates different definitions. In this particular case, you and I are coming from two different social groups where one uses several as 2 or more, and the other uses it as more than 2. It's impossible to be more precise here because the rules of the two particular segments aren't equivalent; you could be right in one and not the other, but that has nothing to do with precision between the two.

On the subject of precision in this matter of magnetic fields, I personally didn't find it necessarily better, as I was not looking at a precise amount. Wikipedia suggested 1/100 as the fraction, which to me didn't seem particularly precise: it seemed, in fact, that they were suggesting 2 orders of magnitude. In physics courses I took in college, we usually gave an error of one order of magnitude as acceptable for a correct answer with extremely large or small numbers, so I didn't want to say two, as the fraction given already seemed like an approximation; 'several,' which I typically use as something akin to "more than one and less than five," seemed like a good fit, since it offered room for the error that I wanted to imply with enormous numbers relating to planetary forces. Precision in this particular actually seemed less ideal, since exact numbers weren't provided.

False dichotomy. Words and meanings are socially negotiated. While there may indeed be expressive vs technical language, you cannot make the claim of being more precise.

I don't think I said I was more precise, but I guess that is what I meant. Nor did I say that there were only two ways to communicate. I said "more emotional" or "more technical" - lots of room between the extremes. Sure, I guess you could find the mid point then declare that there are only two sides. Like saying that some people are more short and some are more tall. We know that the world consists of more than just short or tall people.

One meaning or another isn't even any more emotional or more technical in practical terms. I defy you to find a journal that would accept "a couple" as part of a formal definition of anything.

As you noted there is "technical" language, where words have very defined meanings. Law, medicine and science are good examples. My initial response was regarding something technical in nature so to say "several" where only "two" was correct prompted me to make a clarification/correction. In this case I will claim to be more precise.

Using "a couple" like that is more precise, but it isn't any more accurate-- again, in practice. It so happens I've met precisely two people in real life who use "a couple" to mean precisely two of something, and even they're somewhat flexible about it.
My understanding was always that "a couple" is less than "several", and "a few" spans a lot of the territory covered by "a couple" and "several", but anyone that got picky about it was always labeled, well, too picky. They could all be anything from two to a little over five, and almost up to ten if you were stretching it. If you were lucky, you could get away with including one, even. That is, that was my understanding from living in different areas of the southern part of the lower peninsula of Michigan for the last 25+ years. The Internet, as it tends to, throws a bit of monkey wrench into that, but the fact is everyone I've ever used the terms with in real life (as far as I can remember) has used them with remarkable consistency, and a lower degree of precision than most people in this thread seem to be used to.

Sorry I ducked out of the conversation yesterday. I didn't mean to post and run, but Iconic was right in his interpretation of my statement that you just can't claim to be more precise in this case.

Who is doing the negotiating of the meanings of words? Probably the people that write them and the people that enjoy reading or listening to them. Those who entertain are in the forefront. Those that inform, not so much.

The up side to this is that despite the hyperbole, young people are in general smarter and better informed than ever. At some point the constant exaggeration is going to lose it's appeal and people will value straight talk and not respond to ridiculousness.

The thing is, language is much more like an evolving species than a frozen system of static rules. Yeah, the rules help give form, and words can't mean anything we want them to, but they do change and in order to communicate well, we have to be able to understand how they are used in other people's discourse. With regard to the News, hyperbole certainly works for a while, but then people become inoculated and learn not to trust certain types of language use. The source of words matters in our interpretation. It doesn't necessarily mean that the word's meaning is lost, but it does mean that when that word comes from a particular source it may mean something different.

I also don't think that valuing 'straight talk' implies a return to certain forms and meanings. Some words will be forever transformed by media use. New words or old words with new meanings can be employed in straight talk. It has much more to do with the source or genre of information than the actual words themselves.