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What kind of soul-rot afflicts a man who can't say "What the documents circulated by WikiLeaks say isn't true anymore", but must say instead "The documents circ
by numeromancer 16y ago
What kind of soul-rot afflicts a man who can't say "What the documents circulated by WikiLeaks say isn't true anymore", but must say instead "The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not reflect the current on-ground realities"?
- bjelkeman-again 16y agoIt is just an attempt at disparaging the content. The more highfalutin language used the better. Of course things change, they change everyday. These kind of comments are often used to confuse the issue without saying anything meaningful.
- roel_v 16y agoWhy does a more eloquent word choice say something about a man's morals? Why is the 'isn't true anymore' variety morally superior to the other one?
- cabalamat 16y agoI assume the point the original poster was making is that when people use complex and obfuscatory language, they typically do so in order to deceive.
- roel_v 16y agoI guess it's a value judgment and a function of one's command of the language to decide when something is 'complex' and 'obfuscatory'. I'm not even a native English speaker and I had no problem at all understanding what's being said. It's just the language that is used in a certain environment, I don't see any sign of deliberately trying to obfuscate the issue. If a doctor tells me tomorrow that I have a "malignant neoplasm on the trachea', is he an evil man that tries to hide the truth from me? No it's just what the terms he's used to using when he talks about throat cancer. (disclaimer: I don't know anything about cancer and I just wikipedia'd this example)
- numeromancer 16y agoWhen a doctor says you have a "malignant neoplasm on the trachea", he is being precise, not obfuscatory. When technical language confounds us, our problem is ignorance; we have come to a place where we do not yet know the names, and time and study and attention will make things clear to us. When obfuscatory language deceives us, we have come to place where the doors have been closed in our faces. That is the difference. And that the doors have been closed out of habit or fear, and not out of malice, does not help us at all.
- roel_v 16y agoYes, exactly. So now the question can be brought back to whether "do not reflect the current on-ground realities" is jargon or technical language, or not. I can easily imagine it is, for higher-level military commanders. Just like 'synergy' is a word that means something to professional managers in bigger organizations and consultancy. I know it's a word that is often derided by technical people for being meaningless management mumbo jumbo, but that's just a brash generalization coming from ignorance of the field of management. Anyway my objection against the original comment was precisely this; the OP made a statement on the intent of who said those words based on (from what I read between the lines of the post) prejudices and his/her own ignorance.
- rdl 16y agoHe's Pakistani; Pakistani (and Indian) English tends to have different phrasings -- probably tending toward stilted and archaic to western taste. I think he was just trying to say "it's not like that NOW" without saying it was necessarily true in the past. Passive voice, indirection, implication, etc. all have a long tradition in bureaucracy. Also, he's an ISI commander, so there is no chance he has soul-rot, as he has no soul.
- numeromancer 16y agoI don't know Pakistani, but I don't think that's the cause of the awkward phrasing. It's more likely that he has picked up bureaucratic English too well.