> This illustrates a difference between proper nouns and common nouns. Common noun phrases describe their referent. Proper noun phrases do not describe, they merelydesignate. A woman named Joy can be in a bad mood; a man named Ernest can dissemble; and building named Green can be a light brown tinged with crud.

> Call them improper nouns. It's like a stealth proper noun: like a proper noun phrase, it designates, without describing, but it sure looks like it's just garden-variety description.It has none of the ordinary indications that proper nouns do that twig us it is designating without describing. Proper nouns, for instance, are designated with capital letters. In real-world MIT, the confusion fostered by the name of the Green Building is strictly an aural artifact. There's no confusion that the Green Building is not merely a green building in writing. Of course, we have no capital letters in spoken English, so there's ambiguity aloud. In our hypothetical color-coded MIT, that ambiguity persists in writing, because "the green building" is not just not a building that is physically green, but not capitalized either: it's an improper noun.

I can understand this part. Improper Noun is not a grammatical error, but the designation of a word that purely designates as a word that describes.

> First, over on Reddit's r/science, somebody posted an article about research into the "highly sensitive person". A lot of commenters were very upset and bewildered by what they took the research to be saying about people who were particularly "sensitive", in some sense or another.

The problem here is that "highly sensitive person" doesn't just refer to people who are sensitive. Perhaps it should be in initial capitals, as a proper proper noun – "Highly Sensitive Person" – but in the popular press article, it wasn't. It's a psychological construct proposed by psychologist Elaine Aron. It is a technical term, with a technical definition and criteria. It is, in other words, an improper noun. The findings do not concern sensitivity per se, they concern people who meet the criteria for this psychological construct designated, non-obviously, by the improper noun "highly sensitive person".

One commenter angrily asked why would a researcher assume someone who is very easily annoyed by subtle physical sensations would also be prone to emotional rejection sensitivity. The answer is simple: the researcher didn't assume that. That's definitional to Aron's HSP construct. If you don't have both, you don't meet the criteria. Highly Sensitive People aren't just highly sensitive people, they're people who meet sufficient criteria for the Highly Sensitive People construct.

But I don’t understand this example. First, it’s most probably because I haven’t read anything about Highly Sensitive Person before, so everything I say next is 99% BS.

Second, in this case, the jargonification or technicalisation of the word ‘sensitive’ have meanings that overlap with the non-technical ‘sensitive’. It’s an improper Improper Noun: both ‘sensitive’ describe something similar, but the technical version has expanded the word to mean beyond the common knowledge, yet it still retains its HSP construct’s designatory power. It’s still a common noun, a noun that describes; maybe call it a Noble Noun, seeing how high and mighty it seems to be from the Common Noun.

Very interesting read, nonetheless.