This annoyed me even before I had a stroke: people are not very clear in their communications. Too frequently do people say something like “He gave him a new project and he thought the deadline was too soon”. If we replace the pronous with actual names, would it be like this:
Bob gave Tom a new project and Tom thought the deadline was too soon.
Or like this?
Bob gave Tom a new project and Bob thought the deadline was too soon.
The second example seems to make less sense. Why would Bob think the deadline was too soon if the details of the project was already known to him? But this isn’t made entirely clear in the statement. We’re not well placed to object if the circumstances are such that Tom sets the deadline for the project; the original statement was vague and matches both eventualities. Just because we assumed that the first interpretation was correct doesn’t mean the statement had only one interpretation.
So any use of pronouns needs to be crafted so as to be unambiguous. This is only made more confusing by current tendencies to choose pronouns arbitrarily for oneself as He and She need not translate as the listener expects and is sometimes omitted entirely in favour of other pronouns entirely. In spoken swedish we rarely separate between They(In swedish: De) and Them(In swedish: Dem) and just use the general form “Dom“. But “Dom” can be used many times in a single sentence and refer to a melange of different groups of people or objects, which often doesn’t relay any information and just makes the listener ask: Who did what to whom?
This might be a hard switch from one case to the other, but we can also see quite an issue in the chat-segment of streamers like Joshimuz and English Ben. We might have the streamer ask some question:
Does the Cheetah spawn in San Fiero or just in Las Venturas?
To which the reply is “Yes”. To what exactly are you answering? Asking simple Yes/No questions seems preferable but it isn’t uncommon for multiple question to be asked and for the answer to be Yes or No. I would suggest that a good answer would be something that clarifies what the answer relates to:
Yes, the Cheetah spawns in San Fiero as well.
Note: I don’t know which cars spawn where, I haven’t played GTA: SA for decades. These questions and answers are merely for demonstration.
While it is only in really critical situations where you have to be clear, even in other situations you probably want to get some point across. You are saying things after all… So it makes sense to avoid ambiguity in most circumstances.