3 ms·

> "The Mona Lisa is overrated" means much the same as "Most people rate the Mona Lisa's merits more highly than it really deserves". The former sentence implie

> "The Mona Lisa is overrated" means much the same as "Most people rate the Mona Lisa's merits more highly than it really deserves". The former sentence implies the existence of an essential characteristic of being overrated, while the latter makes an observation, possibly incorrect. I think facts vs. opinions isn't so much the relevant distinction here as things being as they are because of Aristotelian essences vs. happening because of action (in this case, judgement). With the Barack Obama example, the is-ness crept back in with "false impression" ("the impression is false"); rewriting English the whole way down seems excessively cumbersome to me, of course, but I've found doing it as an exercise to helps me recognize when ideas are reified largely due to language quirks.

gjm11 18y ago
I think the dubious assumptions in the two versions of the Mona Lisa one are equivalent; what's implied by "being overrated" is the same as what's implied by "really deserves". If you think "false impression" is bad because "the impression is false" has a copula in it, then congratulations: you just abolished adjectives. "... the red bicycle ..." -> "the bicycle is red". Whatever the problem is here, it isn't is-ness. I completely agree that rewriting what you say in a restricted subset of English (or whatever natural language) has value for seeing what assumptions are slipping in unobserved. It's totally not clear to me that "is"-less English is any better for this purpose than, say, adverb-less English or e-less English; I suspect that most of the gain comes from forcing yourself to write with a strong constraint, which makes you think more. It's not so very different from (one reason) why poetic and musical forms (sonnets, sonata form, haiku, fugue, ...) work well. I wouldn't be surprised if forbidding "is" were a bit better than those, for various reasons. But I suspect that the bulk of the winnage comes from the mere fact of being constrained.
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  > "... writing with a strong constraint, which makes you think more." I agree. E-Prime was inspired by General Semantics ( see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics , the "Overview" section on that page seems sufficient), though, and had a much more specific motive than just improving writing. While E-Prime can focus too much on just "is", I think it seems like an approachable introduction to the ideas. I also thought they might be of interest here, because there's a neat parallel between them and e.g. thinking about is-a/has-a in OO design, the ways having quote empowers Lisp, etc.

gjm11 18y ago

I think the dubious assumptions in the two versions of the Mona Lisa one are equivalent; what's implied by "being overrated" is the same as what's implied by "really deserves". If you think "false impression" is bad because "the impression is false" has a copula in it, then congratulations: you just abolished adjectives. "... the red bicycle ..." -> "the bicycle is red". Whatever the problem is here, it isn't is-ness. I completely agree that rewriting what you say in a restricted subset of English (or whatever natural language) has value for seeing what assumptions are slipping in unobserved. It's totally not clear to me that "is"-less English is any better for this purpose than, say, adverb-less English or e-less English; I suspect that most of the gain comes from forcing yourself to write with a strong constraint, which makes you think more. It's not so very different from (one reason) why poetic and musical forms (sonnets, sonata form, haiku, fugue, ...) work well. I wouldn't be surprised if forbidding "is" were a bit better than those, for various reasons. But I suspect that the bulk of the winnage comes from the mere fact of being constrained.

silentbicycle 18y ago
> "... writing with a strong constraint, which makes you think more." I agree. E-Prime was inspired by General Semantics ( see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics , the "Overview" section on that page seems sufficient), though, and had a much more specific motive than just improving writing. While E-Prime can focus too much on just "is", I think it seems like an approachable introduction to the ideas. I also thought they might be of interest here, because there's a neat parallel between them and e.g. thinking about is-a/has-a in OO design, the ways having quote empowers Lisp, etc.