5 ms·

“A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy,

“A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge’s eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.” Not too bad throughout, just a lot of embedded asides/commentary https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm#cP https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm#cP

anzumitsu 1y ago
That’s the preface, the study in question dealt with the opening of Chapter 1
- jasonthorsness 1y ago
  I like it “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.”
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
    It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority of people to be able to read this?
    - falcor84 1y ago
      I for one absolutely agree that reading this : reading books intended for transmitting information = swimming through molasses : swimming through water
      - KPGv2 1y ago
        It's physically impossible to swim through molasses. The analogy is either a failure or an insult.
        AlexandrB 1y ago
        Is it? Syrup is swimmable: https://mythresults.com/swimming-in-syrup https://mythresults.com/swimming-in-syrup
        haiku2077 1y ago
        Molasses is a thicker concentrate, and is infamously deadly when it floods. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        falcor84 1y ago
        Everything is deadly when it floods, with water floods being responsible for about half of all deaths from global natural disasters [0]. The Wikipedia article you linked to describes the event but says nothing about swimming through it. There's a Scientific American article that analyzed this based on the Reynolds number [1] and arrived at a conclusion that you can't swim through molasses via regular symmetric motions and would need something different, which sounds quite appropriate for the analogy. [0] https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2101 https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2101 [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-physics-science/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-ph...
  - jazzypants 1y ago
    That's not unreadable, it's captivating!
  - slowmovintarget 1y ago
    So it opens with a tone poem. Unsurprising that readers must be encouraged to improve their attention spans. ("Git gud at readin'")
  - B1FF_PSUVM 1y ago
    Short sentences, too. Some people like to ramble on for quite a few lines before reaching for a period.
  - colinwilyb 1y ago
    When I write, it comes out like this. Pulling your attention to and fro across a scene to construct "brain pictures", letting your imagination fill in the gaps as the fragments become a whole. The mention of Megalosaurus was jarring. My imagination placed this within a gloomy late-Victorian period and the mention of giant lizard caused mental association to very unrelated content for the rest of paragraph. I think a Wooly Mammoth waddling up the hill would make for a better picture. On another note: What are horse blinkers?
    - mrob 1y ago
      Bleak House was first serialized in 1852. The famous Crystal Palace Dinosaurs were commissioned in 1852 and first shown to the public in 1854. The timing lines up with dinosaurs being something new and exciting to the readers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs The collection includes an (inaccurate) model of a Megalosaurus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Crystal_Palace_-_Victorian_Dinosaurs_1_4887762470.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Cry... Horse blinkers are things that restrict a horse's field of vision to directly in front of it so it's less likely to get startled or distracted. Readers would also have been familiar with them, because they were commonly used with horses pulling carriages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkers_(horse_tack) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkers_(horse_tack)
  - deltarholamda 1y ago
    Summarizers will shorten this to something like "It was very muddy in London." Very lossy compression.
  - StefanBatory 1y ago
    I'm not a native speaker, but I feel this isn't that hard to read? Maybe not if I was in a wrong headspace, but I can get the gist looking at it. Question would be, what is Michaelmas? My first thought would be it's a prime minister or president, but I'd need to ask for context. If so, their term has just finished and there's a change in govt. Also, weather sucks so much and it's so muddy, the streets resemble more of some prehistoric places :P Holborn Hill is some place, part of me would say it's a street, English naming is weird. Also I'd say that the role of those sentences is retardation to slow the reading down and to paint a dreary picture. Unless I'm falling into a trap and overestimating my comprehension.
    - mkehrt 1y ago
      Michelmas is a holiday in September. Michelmas term is a British school term (fall term, I guess) and apparently also means the beginning of the legal year.
- ryandv 1y ago
  I still don't see the issue. Do people really have difficulty reading this level of English?
  - Filmatic 1y ago
    Yes. They do in fact find this easy-to-read and straightforward passage challenging, or even impenetrable. A key problem seems to be that more than half of folks either have functionally no working memory, or for some reason fail to exercise it whatsoever when reading. They can't retain one or two subjects or actions or details about setting in their head while they read on a few more words to see how the passage comes together. As soon as you ask them to hold any amount of context past the end of a sentence, they'll judge your writing "difficult", or in even harsher terms. The brighter of this set will latch on to Hemingway's preferences as gospel and declare that anything harder to swallow than cotton candy is simply bad. Never mind that most of these folks probably struggle to understand Hemingway, too. I don't know whether this has always been the case, or it's something that has changed over time. I suspect the latter, and that the rise of radio and especially TV had exactly the effects that critics worried they would, but have no data to back it up. Just a hunch.
- pitpatagain 1y ago
  The preface is much more circuitous and difficult than the opening of Chapter 1. The opening of Chapter 1 is very vivid and descriptive, but pretty straightforward, even the archaic stuff in it you really should be able to guess at from context. Is it the easiest thing to read? No. Should university English majors be able to read it? Good grief, yes, this is such a wildly low bar.
- zapw 1y ago
  Since other commenters seem to think that the passage is just the first paragraph of chapter 1 (the fact of which suggests its own meta-commentary on the content of the article), it's worth mentioning that the passage is the first seven paragraphs of chapter 1, in which there are definitely some challenging sections, particularly in the later paragraphs.
andrepd 1y ago
Lmao, this is the "swimming through molasses"? We're done for. I know it's a cliche but algorithmic social media has destroyed our attention spans and our ability to think; LLMs are on their way to destroy what's left.
AlanYx 1y ago
There's a deep beauty in that sentence that probably isn't apparent on the surface. The "popular prejudice" that Dickens was referring to about the Court of Chancery was, in part, that it had ponderously complex proceedings and took forever to get anywhere. So while Dickens did have a very wordy writing style, the embedded asides in that sentence are probably calculated to subconsciously echo the longwinded, circuitous style of the court.

anzumitsu 1y ago

That’s the preface, the study in question dealt with the opening of Chapter 1

jasonthorsness 1y ago
I like it “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.”
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority of people to be able to read this?
  - falcor84 1y ago
    I for one absolutely agree that reading this : reading books intended for transmitting information = swimming through molasses : swimming through water
    - KPGv2 1y ago
      It's physically impossible to swim through molasses. The analogy is either a failure or an insult.
      - AlexandrB 1y ago
        Is it? Syrup is swimmable: https://mythresults.com/swimming-in-syrup https://mythresults.com/swimming-in-syrup
        haiku2077 1y ago
        Molasses is a thicker concentrate, and is infamously deadly when it floods. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        falcor84 1y ago
        Everything is deadly when it floods, with water floods being responsible for about half of all deaths from global natural disasters [0]. The Wikipedia article you linked to describes the event but says nothing about swimming through it. There's a Scientific American article that analyzed this based on the Reynolds number [1] and arrived at a conclusion that you can't swim through molasses via regular symmetric motions and would need something different, which sounds quite appropriate for the analogy. [0] https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2101 https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2101 [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-physics-science/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-ph...
- jazzypants 1y ago
  That's not unreadable, it's captivating!
- slowmovintarget 1y ago
  So it opens with a tone poem. Unsurprising that readers must be encouraged to improve their attention spans. ("Git gud at readin'")
- B1FF_PSUVM 1y ago
  Short sentences, too. Some people like to ramble on for quite a few lines before reaching for a period.
- colinwilyb 1y ago
  When I write, it comes out like this. Pulling your attention to and fro across a scene to construct "brain pictures", letting your imagination fill in the gaps as the fragments become a whole. The mention of Megalosaurus was jarring. My imagination placed this within a gloomy late-Victorian period and the mention of giant lizard caused mental association to very unrelated content for the rest of paragraph. I think a Wooly Mammoth waddling up the hill would make for a better picture. On another note: What are horse blinkers?
  - mrob 1y ago
    Bleak House was first serialized in 1852. The famous Crystal Palace Dinosaurs were commissioned in 1852 and first shown to the public in 1854. The timing lines up with dinosaurs being something new and exciting to the readers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs The collection includes an (inaccurate) model of a Megalosaurus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Crystal_Palace_-_Victorian_Dinosaurs_1_4887762470.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Cry... Horse blinkers are things that restrict a horse's field of vision to directly in front of it so it's less likely to get startled or distracted. Readers would also have been familiar with them, because they were commonly used with horses pulling carriages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkers_(horse_tack) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkers_(horse_tack)
- deltarholamda 1y ago
  Summarizers will shorten this to something like "It was very muddy in London." Very lossy compression.
- StefanBatory 1y ago
  I'm not a native speaker, but I feel this isn't that hard to read? Maybe not if I was in a wrong headspace, but I can get the gist looking at it. Question would be, what is Michaelmas? My first thought would be it's a prime minister or president, but I'd need to ask for context. If so, their term has just finished and there's a change in govt. Also, weather sucks so much and it's so muddy, the streets resemble more of some prehistoric places :P Holborn Hill is some place, part of me would say it's a street, English naming is weird. Also I'd say that the role of those sentences is retardation to slow the reading down and to paint a dreary picture. Unless I'm falling into a trap and overestimating my comprehension.
  - mkehrt 1y ago
    Michelmas is a holiday in September. Michelmas term is a British school term (fall term, I guess) and apparently also means the beginning of the legal year.
ryandv 1y ago
I still don't see the issue. Do people really have difficulty reading this level of English?
- Filmatic 1y ago
  Yes. They do in fact find this easy-to-read and straightforward passage challenging, or even impenetrable. A key problem seems to be that more than half of folks either have functionally no working memory, or for some reason fail to exercise it whatsoever when reading. They can't retain one or two subjects or actions or details about setting in their head while they read on a few more words to see how the passage comes together. As soon as you ask them to hold any amount of context past the end of a sentence, they'll judge your writing "difficult", or in even harsher terms. The brighter of this set will latch on to Hemingway's preferences as gospel and declare that anything harder to swallow than cotton candy is simply bad. Never mind that most of these folks probably struggle to understand Hemingway, too. I don't know whether this has always been the case, or it's something that has changed over time. I suspect the latter, and that the rise of radio and especially TV had exactly the effects that critics worried they would, but have no data to back it up. Just a hunch.
pitpatagain 1y ago
The preface is much more circuitous and difficult than the opening of Chapter 1. The opening of Chapter 1 is very vivid and descriptive, but pretty straightforward, even the archaic stuff in it you really should be able to guess at from context. Is it the easiest thing to read? No. Should university English majors be able to read it? Good grief, yes, this is such a wildly low bar.
zapw 1y ago
Since other commenters seem to think that the passage is just the first paragraph of chapter 1 (the fact of which suggests its own meta-commentary on the content of the article), it's worth mentioning that the passage is the first seven paragraphs of chapter 1, in which there are definitely some challenging sections, particularly in the later paragraphs.

andrepd 1y ago

Lmao, this is the "swimming through molasses"? We're done for. I know it's a cliche but algorithmic social media has destroyed our attention spans and our ability to think; LLMs are on their way to destroy what's left.

AlanYx 1y ago

There's a deep beauty in that sentence that probably isn't apparent on the surface. The "popular prejudice" that Dickens was referring to about the Court of Chancery was, in part, that it had ponderously complex proceedings and took forever to get anywhere. So while Dickens did have a very wordy writing style, the embedded asides in that sentence are probably calculated to subconsciously echo the longwinded, circuitous style of the court.