Tootfinder

Shininess, strong politeness, and unicorns
Benjamin Przybocki, Guilherme V. Toledo, Yoni Zohar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04445 https://

Shininess, strong politeness, and unicorns
Shininess and strong politeness are properties related to theory combination procedures. In a paper titled "Many-sorted equivalence of shiny and strongly polite theories", Casal and Rasga proved that for decidable theories, these properties are equivalent. We refine their result by showing that: (i) shiny theories are always decidable, and therefore strongly polite; and (ii) there are (undecidable) strongly polite theories that are not shiny. This line of research is tightly related to a recent…

@… if you want to ask that question, hasn't the station for politeness already been passed?

Minding the Politeness Gap in Cross-cultural Communication
Yuka Machino, Matthias Hofer, Max Siegel, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Robert D. Hawkins
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15623

Minding the Politeness Gap in Cross-cultural Communication
Misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication often arise from subtle differences in interpretation, but it is unclear whether these differences arise from the literal meanings assigned to words or from more general pragmatic factors such as norms around politeness and brevity. In this paper, we report three experiments examining how speakers of British and American English interpret intensifiers like "quite" and "very." To better understand these cross-cultural differences, we developed a …