User:DCDuring/Language intuition, conscious understanding, facts

This business with time of day is one of the "joys" of working with words. It is so easy to have in one's head a conscious understanding that is more than adequate for living that doesn't quite fit even one's own actual usage, let alone prevailing usage. I have found that my own misunderstandings have often continued beyond the time when the facts should have convinced me of my error. (And my problems in this regard do not always lie in the past!) I have finally learned to surrender to attestation. It's almost like scientific method. One's intuitions just generate hypotheses, which, on testing, turn out to be brilliantly true, true within limits, true with explanations, true after transformation, true in the most restricted of senses, or simply false.

I think I am seeing an instance of this confrontation between intuition and attestation. I recollect some of the negative emotion that is sometimes associated with learning this.

I am not myself sure that we yet have the whole story about time of day, but, to an extent, it represents an instance of a confrontation within the Wiktionary community between, on the one hand, the conscious understandings of language of non-native speakers (who often have deficient intuitions to correct that understanding) and the unexamined conscious understandings of native speakers and, on the other hand, actual usage. The intuitions of native speakers are vital to correcting error, but they are not the same as our conscious understanding.