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Actually I was not sarcastic at all. I really loved that sentence as I too have a penchant for long-winding sentences that are hard to parse but in closer inspe
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Actually I was not sarcastic at all. I really loved that sentence as I too have a penchant for long-winding sentences that are hard to parse but in closer inspection have no noise and every word in them is essential. Comes from my days of reading Aristotle where it is not uncommon to have a page of only two sentences. Or look at the Declaration of Independence or the Treaty of Paris for more recent examples of page-sized sentences. I think it shows how far downhill we've gone in terms of literacy or perhaps even mental capacity. Yours, while not in the same league, was a sentence I really liked and it never occurred to me that people might construe my comment as sarcastic.
- Gormo 13y agoApologies; my own writing style is influenced by reading a lot of eighteenth-century text, which tends to be very wordy, but which also seems to express a much higher precision of thought than the more terse modern fashions of writing. I've noticed that Pitarou's advice on rephrasing my original reply would reduce it to something much vaguer than I'd intended, and would simply convey the conclusion of my thought process as a simple yes-or-no response, leaving my actual rationale entirely hidden. I'm not entirely convinced that we've necessarily gone downhill in terms of literacy or mental capacity, but I agree that the outward expressiveness of language certainly has declined in comparison to the past, and this may be in part an explanation for the coarseness and contentiousness of much modern discourse.