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The irony of this post, of course, is that it decries the evolution of language while praising the evolved parts of the language. He decries one aspec

by yk 13y ago

The irony of this post, of course, is that it decries the evolution of language while praising the evolved parts of the language. He decries one aspect of the evolution of language, the aspect which just hides meaning. And it seems to me, that objectively there is a incentive for many stakeholders to disguise the inherent meaning of their message, either to appear more disruptive in whichever space they move, or to straight out lie by misunderstanding. What is deterioration, pray tell? What makes a language worse? Did a change in instruments in the second half of the twentieth century make our music worse? Our great musicians? Did the emergence of Ruby or Python make our programs worse? Our programmers? By what metric? Completely unrelated, but to use Cory Doctorow's [1] argument, it probably is. His argument is, that electric guitars enabled a four man band to play a concert. So at the start of the 20th century you need to be good enough to convince a symphony orchestra to play your music to give a concert. This is a rather strong filter. But with electric amplification all you need to do is to convince a few friends. So probably the average quality of music dropped. But on the other hand, this also allowed the rapid evolution of music in the second half of the last century. Similar I would expect that the average quality of writing is brought down by reddit, but simultaneously this will likely fuel a much faster evolution. And for programming languages, it is again the same. If you need to convince a mainframe operator to run your program, then it should better be written well. [1] http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2010/01/cory-doctorow-close-enough-for-rock-n.html http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2010/01/cory-doctorow-c...

FreakLegion 13y ago
>He decries one aspect of the evolution of language, the aspect which just hides meaning. But that begs the question of whether meanings are in fact hidden, or simply changed -- at least as far as language as a whole is concerned[1]. There are of course individual cases where people are, as you point out, incentivized to do all sorts of weird things with language to accomplish some goal. Thus was rhetoric born. 1. Many insults, for example, shed their original sense and persist only as generic attacks. Does that mean that the original meanings are hidden? Or are they simply no longer relevant? Like 'Scumbag': http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28253/origin-of-scumbag http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28253/origin-of-s.... (Note the several possible etymologies, none of which really bears on its use today anyway.) >And it seems to me, that objectively there is a incentive for many stakeholders to disguise the inherent meaning of their message, either to appear more disruptive in whichever space they move, or to straight out lie by misunderstanding. Well said. "To appear more disruptive" is particularly apropos on HN, where 'disruptive' is so perfunctory an adjective as to have lost all meaning (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glittering_generality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glittering_generality). Edit: To Doctorow's point, I doubt that's quite true. In the West at least, solo pieces (particularly piano), quartets and quintets of various kinds (particularly brass and string), and so on have been popular for ages.
- loup-vaillant 13y ago
  I sometimes try to talk with my mother about truth, reality, correct beliefs and so on. Her problem is, she is relativist. To her, the idea that there's only one reality, and that contradictory beliefs are incompatible is not only false, but repugnant. One of the major causes happens to be vocabulary. In French, the closest synonymous for belief, "croyance", carries a heavy religious connotation. We have other words, such as "knowledge", "opinion"… but they have other problems. We just don't have a short colloquial word to convey the idea of a probability distribution, and no more. "No problem, I'll just define the word for her." But I'm not allowed to. I'm supposed to be accessible, which means no long sentences, and no jargon. My trying to be precise comes of as pedantic, pretentious, and needlessly complicated. And so we're stuck. She doesn't understand what I mean, and I can't explain it to her. Even worse, she actually believes she does understand. Because my words have meanings to her. Just not the meanings I wanted to convey. --- Regarding solo pieces, quartets, and quintets, you should note that guitar has frets. Playing in tune is much easier compared to say, the cello. While becoming a good guitarist requires just as much effort than becoming a good cellist, merely playing something that sounds cool requires much, much less effort.

by yk 13y ago

FreakLegion 13y ago

>He decries one aspect of the evolution of language, the aspect which just hides meaning. But that begs the question of whether meanings are in fact hidden, or simply changed -- at least as far as language as a whole is concerned[1]. There are of course individual cases where people are, as you point out, incentivized to do all sorts of weird things with language to accomplish some goal. Thus was rhetoric born. 1. Many insults, for example, shed their original sense and persist only as generic attacks. Does that mean that the original meanings are hidden? Or are they simply no longer relevant? Like 'Scumbag': http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28253/origin-of-scumbag http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28253/origin-of-s.... (Note the several possible etymologies, none of which really bears on its use today anyway.) >And it seems to me, that objectively there is a incentive for many stakeholders to disguise the inherent meaning of their message, either to appear more disruptive in whichever space they move, or to straight out lie by misunderstanding. Well said. "To appear more disruptive" is particularly apropos on HN, where 'disruptive' is so perfunctory an adjective as to have lost all meaning (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glittering_generality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glittering_generality). Edit: To Doctorow's point, I doubt that's quite true. In the West at least, solo pieces (particularly piano), quartets and quintets of various kinds (particularly brass and string), and so on have been popular for ages.

loup-vaillant 13y ago
I sometimes try to talk with my mother about truth, reality, correct beliefs and so on. Her problem is, she is relativist. To her, the idea that there's only one reality, and that contradictory beliefs are incompatible is not only false, but repugnant. One of the major causes happens to be vocabulary. In French, the closest synonymous for belief, "croyance", carries a heavy religious connotation. We have other words, such as "knowledge", "opinion"… but they have other problems. We just don't have a short colloquial word to convey the idea of a probability distribution, and no more. "No problem, I'll just define the word for her." But I'm not allowed to. I'm supposed to be accessible, which means no long sentences, and no jargon. My trying to be precise comes of as pedantic, pretentious, and needlessly complicated. And so we're stuck. She doesn't understand what I mean, and I can't explain it to her. Even worse, she actually believes she does understand. Because my words have meanings to her. Just not the meanings I wanted to convey. --- Regarding solo pieces, quartets, and quintets, you should note that guitar has frets. Playing in tune is much easier compared to say, the cello. While becoming a good guitarist requires just as much effort than becoming a good cellist, merely playing something that sounds cool requires much, much less effort.