Curb appeal: manicuring your home and language
Imagine you’re walking or driving down a street where every house looks like a Beverly Hills MacMansion. The lawns are thick & green, with flowerbeds that are perfectly trimmed, and the front doors are painted in high-gloss colors. In real estate, this is called Curb Appeal. It’s the art of making the exterior look so flawless that you don't even think to check if the pipes are leaking or the basement is flooding. This effect is based of your own intuition and expections, no one would assume of Beverly Hills mansion extoiroir would look like a crack house in the interior. But this effect isn’t only limited to real estate, but it has very real world carryovers into language, specifically with informal speech as we have seen in class with ‘words don't mean what they mean. If you were asked, which of the 2 homes do you think would contains a nicer family? If you’re like majority of people, you picked the bottom photo. But why? Mathematically, it’s the same square fo...