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Fossuser’s criticism was not directed at the article at all. It was directed at the Fulcanelli quote given by ohaideredevs. The Dwellings if Philosophers (as
by dpark 8y ago
Fossuser’s criticism was not directed at the article at all. It was directed at the Fulcanelli quote given by ohaideredevs.
The Dwellings if Philosophers (as translated) starts out with “Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception.” This says so little with such absurd wording that it’s almost word soup.
- topynate 8y agoThe only phrase which really is "too French" here is "proposes to the sagacity of its admirers". (It's not wrong, but not many English speakers still use "propose" in its sense of "set before someone as a goal".) Other than that, I see a well-balanced sentence in which every word has a purpose – but "well-balanced" versus "straight-forward" is a matter of taste.
- dpark 8y agoEvery time I read that sentence I can't help but picture some huckster standing on a soap box at an intersection in an impoverished neighborhood in the 30s. It's so clearly crafted to impress rather than inform that I can't help but feel a sales pitch is coming.
- foldr 8y agoWell, yeah, which just goes to show that you're interpreting a work written by a French alchemist in 1929 in an American cultural context where everything is some kind of sales pitch - which is why you're getting the wrong end of the stick.
- incog-neato 8y agoI agree that's the most cumbersome phrase. But I think the difficulty people are perceiving here is more in the grammar being difficult to parse rather than in the vocabulary being florid.
- the_af 8y agoWhich words seem absurd and word soup to you? "Paradoxical"? "Sagacity"? "Manifestation"? "Resolution" Perhaps because Spanish is my first language, none of those seem purple prose or difficult to me. They are very straightforward, with the possible exception of "paradoxical": most people who don't read books don't know what it means. For example "sagaz" (someone who displays sagacity) is a very common word to us; Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings is called Samsagaz in the Spanish translation. Now if you're going to argue all Latin-based and Romance languages are less straightforward than English, that's a riskier (and dismissive!) proposition.
- Sharlin 8y agoI'd say "Sagacity" is definitely a very rare word in English, certainly less common than "paradoxical". It is often the case in English that a Romance loan is considerably more high-brow than its Germanic synonym ("wisdom" in this case). (I'm not a native speaker either, though.)
- dpark 8y agoThe problem is not merely with the words chosen but they way they're stitched together. Someone else tried to rewrite it without the over-the-top flowery language and it's far more concise despite still not being particularly minimalist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741886 >60% reduction in content for a single off-the-cuff rewrite implies the original work needs an aggressive editor with an aggressive amount of red ink.
- the_af 8y agoThe rewrite, while simpler and arguably clearer, also seems more boring to me. It doesn't engage my imagination. In any case, the original doesn't set off my "bullshit detectors". Such an aggressive way of commenting on a piece of writing! Not everyone must or should write like Hemingway -- not even Hemingway!
- dpark 8y agoThat's fair and maybe it is more boring. It was, after all, an off-the-cuff rewrite by some random person on HN. It wasn't written to demonstrate the ideal way to present the argument, but as a way of showing that the original used a whole lot of words to say not that much.