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What an absurd and pathetic characterization of Southern Mountain Speech and/or rural American dialect. It comes across as speaking more to your character than your polemic target.
> Southern Mountain Speech and/or rural American dialect Funny, I thought it was a phonetic transcription of Scottish dialect (whence are derived many Appalachian speech patterns, of course).
How much of PG's blog is based on setting up strawmen and using them to bash on the liberal arts? > Even one sentence of this would raise eyebrows in conversation. And yet people write whole books of it. These sentences immediately identify one big, relevant difference between speech and non-blog writing, which is not commented on in the blog post: people do not generally give book-length monologues on a single topic…
> How much of PG's blog is based on setting up strawmen and using them to bash on the liberal arts? It'd be surprising if PG wanted to bash the liberal arts, given his longstanding interest in fine arts, specifically painting; see, e.g., his Hackers and Painters book. (He studied painting at RISD and in Florence.) https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graha…
Whey if a wrert like a taa'ked, a divn't think anyone would kna what a wa' gaan an aboot...
What an absurd and pathetic characterization of Southern Mountain Speech and/or rural American dialect. It comes across as speaking more to your character than your polemic target.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see why what you're saying and what the blog post says are incompatible. I feel like Graham is not saying "simplify your thoughts," but rather "simplify your words." Think Up Goer 5 ( https://xkcd.com/1133/ ) but maybe not as extreme. What I understood from your comment is that for complex topics (like quantum mechanics), complex language is necessary. This section of the post clarifies Graham's thoughts on t…
Up Goer 5 is a fantastic example of why complex language is necessary. Even in a short example, it already defines clumsy replacements for the words it's trying to use, like "Sky Bag Air" (Hydrogen), "Funny Voice Air" (Helium) and "Breathing Type Air" (Oxygen). Other artificially-simple language projects, like the Simple English Wikipedia* or Toki Pona generally end up in the same place. You get the linguistic equiva…
> but anyone capable of working out the minimally complex language needed for any given topic likely doesn't need to be told this.
This is where I (and I think Graham) disagree with you. In my opinion, this is very not easy. When I write - especially about complex topics - I feel more comfortable complicating my thoughts.
If you don't mind the anecdote, in middle and high school I thought I was hot shit because my classmates would struggle to write enough to meet the page limit and I would struggle to not go over it. As it turns out, this is not because I had more to say. It's because I would use twice the number of words to say it. But it was certainly complex prose that used fancy language - sometimes, I'd argue, parts were even well-written.
I do still think there is an aesthetic to language, but I've grown to believe that simple language possesses beauty too. I can appreciate now how famous writers like Hemingway could agonize for a day over a single sentence. Especially because I look at the four paragraphs I wrote in response and think to myself, "man I bet this is way more complicated and rambly than it needs to be."
> But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are. Disagree. When you're writing / reading, it's much easier to parse complex sentences. It's also much easier to express a cohesive, complex thought this way compared to a meandering, directionless sentence. And the whole point of "fancy words" are to succinctly con…
Fwiw Stephen King in "On Writing" also says to not use a thesaurus and just use the words you already naturally know how to use. He follows on saying your vocabulary will naturally expand as you read more.
If writers aren't learning new words, then readers can't learn from them. When do writers learn new words? From reading! Who writes what the writer reads? Writers.
King seems to be saying "the best way to discover new words is through the labor and chance of picking up the right books and finding some words you had not read before". So all words that can ever be useful have already been written or will be invented by fiction writers, and it is up to you to read a variety of styles and types of fiction rather than the compendium on your shelf. I find this notion silly.
The answer of course is a blend. If someone is leaning on a thesaurus to make bad writing good, there will be a problem, too.
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You hit the nail on the head, mostly. > then you read the room and go with the layer of abstraction needed. Finding the right layer of abstraction is orthogonal to the write-speak axis. When speaking to my colleagues, I use technical jargon that no layman could understand. None of the topics are simple, or strongly abstracted. The issue of write vs. speak is more about the sentence structure, sentence length, and bre…
Slightly off topic: What's with HN and the word "orthogonal"? I'm not a native English speaker, but I read a lot in English and it seems like the word is extremely common on HN compared to anywhere else. Isn't usually "unrelated" a more descriptive and even a more precise word in most HN discussions? (The parent comment here does seem to make a point using axes, so maybe it is more appropriate here?)
Orthogonal does not mean unrelated. Take two vectors in the plane. Them being orthogonal means that they have a 90 degree angle between them, so if you know the direction of one of them, the direction of the other one is severely restricted to two choices. So these vectors are very much RELATED. It's just that they are related in a way that makes them maximally different in a certain sense.
So if you want to say that two things are maximally different in a certain sense, you use orthogonal. If you want to say that one thing has no influence whatsoever on what the other thing is, and the other way around, you use unrelated.
For example, if you randomly choose a point in the plane, then its x and y coordinates will be unrelated, but not orthogonal. The vectors [x 0] and [0 y] are not unrelated, but certainly orthogonal.
Of course, this distinction is easily lost.
> But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are. Disagree. When you're writing / reading, it's much easier to parse complex sentences. It's also much easier to express a cohesive, complex thought this way compared to a meandering, directionless sentence. And the whole point of "fancy words" are to succinctly con…
How about:
He said "After Altamira, all is decadence."
That is the way I would probably phrase it if spoken. Assuming of course that "he" is clear from the context - if not I would use the subject's name.
> But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are. Disagree. When you're writing / reading, it's much easier to parse complex sentences. It's also much easier to express a cohesive, complex thought this way compared to a meandering, directionless sentence. And the whole point of "fancy words" are to succinctly con…
> "mercurial" does the trick in the quoted example, does Paul have a patch? How about: He said "After Altamira, all is decadence." That is the way I would probably phrase it if spoken. Assuming of course that "he" is clear from the context - if not I would use the subject's name.
I can perfectly well imagine saying out loud, in conversation or in a spoken presentation, something like "Being the mercurial Spaniard that he was, Picasso said 'After Altamira, all is decadence'".
I don't think there's anything wrong with the vocabulary choices here, but there is a kind of journalistic writing style which favors brevity, probably originally because you're writing to a column inch count, and it drives writers to try to convey those extra connotations in fewer words. An editor will look at my wordy sentence, tell me to get rid of the throatclearing and filler words and reduce it to "The mercurial Spaniard said..." - and they may well be right.