Comment by EliRivers
6 years ago
I've never understood how someone could master a subject and yet be unable to answer any questions about it.
How about spoken English? I know a great many people who are able to express themselves clearly and gramatically - surely mastery of spoken English - but ask them what the rule is for order of adjectives or some such and many of them would even need to double check what an adjective is.
That's hardly being "unable to answer ANY questions"; try asking them which is more common: "the big red car" vs "the red big car", do you think they'd be unable to answer?
That's not a question about the English language. That's asking someone to use it.
The question of this nature about the English language would be "how do I know what order to put adjectives in?" and the answer would be something along the lines of "opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose".
I do think they would be unable to answer. The rule of course then goes deeper, into ablaut reduplication and so on. People master spoken English without knowing anything [0] about it.
[0] Yes, I know, I said "anything" and now your literalist side is jumping in joy at being able to say "Aha, aha, they DO know at least one thing and therefore your statement is not literally correct!" I don't care.
In the context of the parent comment "I've never understood how someone could master a subject and yet be unable to answer any questions about it.", isn't this your literalist side jumping in joy at being able to say "Aha, aha, I can think of a group of people who have mastered a subject but cannot answer questions about it"?
Except, they can answer questions to show what they know, they just can't answer your carefully selected subset of questions with the exact answers you demand using the terminology you demand.
Draw an arbitrary line around the allowable questions and you can make every group of experts, "people who can't answer questions about it". But what use is that?