Talk:proprioception

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Latest comment: 1 year ago by Zyploc in topic Synonym Choice
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Synonym Choice

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It's likely no user will come across this message, but I feel the need to remark on the contemporary trend of denoting loosely similar words as "synonyms." A synonym, by definition, is a word which holds essentially the same meaning as another; synonymous terms should be able to be used interchangeably in a sentence or text, so that the overall message is not construed by choice of either/or. A corollary of such is that the substitution of a term not fully synonymous may induce confusion in an audience. On this page of proprioception, I see one synonym listed: kinesthesia. While "proprioception" and "kinesthesia" each denote a sense of body position, the former simply constitutes an awareness of one's joints' positions and the latter entails a cognizance of joint motion. In other words, one term refers to ubiety and the other to flux. My point is that these terms do not share identical meaning, and using them interchangeably opens the door to a degradation of orthological integrity. Zyploc (talk) 17:03, 5 May 2023 (UTC)Reply