Posted on 11/01/2005 9:10:26 AM PST by CarrotAndStick
"Mr. Will, please pick up the white courtesy phone."
Amen to that!!
warum haben Sie mir auf deutsch gesprochen? wissen Sie mir?
Or how about a light-year? Is that shorter of longer than a calendar year? An anomalistic year? A Besselian Year? A tropical year? A lunar year? A Julian year? A sidereal year?
And parsec. Don't get me started. How many people who love the sound of that word can define it?
I'm agnostic (that means I reserve judgment for those of you from Loma Linda) about "goes ballistic". That's because I actually use that term in my quotidian (oops, A long word. Bad Lonesome!) professional life and because I was present at what may have been its birth as a colloquialism. As all Freepers know, a missile "goes ballistic" when it enters the "free fall" portion of its trajectory, when it is only influenced by inertia, gravity and perhaps air resistance. It is a gentle portion of the trajectory compared to 11 g's of rocket thrust and scores of g's of reentry shock.
So I'm standing in the hall listening to two contractors from TRWonderful mentioning an encounter with a manager who took his management style from Attila the Hun, only without the horses and sense of humor. So one says to the other, "I mentioned the $5,000,000 overrun and it was at about that time that Roy went ballistic." Soon after that "to go ballistic" entered the vernacular, displacing the older term, "to go non-linear."
One of the things I've never understood about writing is why employers don't value the skill of writing more highly.
I'm not whining here. I work in the information technology field and am happy with my own pay. However, I've noticed that we spend a great deal of time and money doing fixes to computer code that resulted from poor communication. We have run into huge problems because of requirements and specifications that are poorly written.
I have friends who are good writers who assert that their writing ability isn't valued when they apply for jobs. I can't figure out why companies wouldn't place more value on writing ability. Do companies think "good writer" means "person with head lost in the clouds whose only contribution will be abstract haiku for the company newsletter?" I'd be curious if anyone has any insights.
Didn't you mean overly-overly excessive, monumentally verbose and redundantlly repetitive wordiness?
According to the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Pedantry, they differ in molecular weight and solubility. Also hydromorons are asymmetrical and therefore have optical isomers, unlike oxymorons and nitromorons.
As you know, inorganic chemistry is the chemistry of oxymorons.
Nein, ich wissen Sie nicht. Warum nicht auf Deutch gesprochen? Ich spreche sur kleine Deutch.
BTT?
Never mind good writers, my employers (similar field) apparetnly don't (or didn't) value the ability to communicate clearly in spoken English. Some of those poor English-speakers do, in fact, write quite clearly and eloquently (I knew one Chinese guy whose spoken English I could barely understand but who wrote extremely clearly), but many have just as bad written English as spoken. But I guess when you're testing complex software systems that clear communication is not really essential, right?
As you know, inorganic chemistry is the chemistry of oxymorons.
Good answer but not quite complete. Don't forget that organic morons compose 99.44% of the compound DNC.
Personally,I've been working on shorter sentences. I've even set Word to screen them for me.
I'm reading (capital letter P)hilosophy: Somewhere around the Master's level, academics lose the ability to speak to anyone but their instructors. When a sentence makes me review my 3rd grade sentence diagraming. I've decided that good writing does not require me to review sentence diagraming from the 3rd grade.
Welcome to the 21st Century
The new language being evolved is talking to/with another -- rather than the soliloquy style of the Associated Press and academic style -- which doesn’t recognize and involve the reader in the communication. In a sense, there is no communication going on but rather a one-sided lecture, or dump. The whole objective of that exercise is to display one’s superiority and dominance over the other -- rather than engage the other as a peer, and co-creator of that interaction. In other words, the writer doesn’t just write -- and reader be damned if they don’t understand it. What is centrally important is the shared understanding that should emerge from that interaction/communication.
It has profound implications for other venues such as the schools and universities. Many teachers think their job is to teach -- and the job of the student is to learn, but that it is not an interaction by which a shared understanding is emerging. The old model is just for the superior to insist that the inferior learn his point of view -- as though the student has nothing to contribute to the learning process. The student is simply acted upon by the instructor -- and both roles are reaffirmed. The student acknowledges his inferiority to the superior “master.”
In the new model of 21st century life, every individual plays all the roles, as it is appropriate for him to do so; at times he is the instructor and at others, he is the student. There is no struggle for superiority and dominance that is the justification for that interaction/communication. The tone of that communication tells as much or more than the actual words and arguments -- whether that relationship and regard is exploitative or not. An exploitative relationship seeks to establish that dominance. In a relationship between peers and equals, there is no energy wasted in that struggle -- as is common in much of the animal kingdom. Virtually all their communication and interactions is to establish and maintain that pecking order -- of who is more powerful than the other, on down.
Intelligent people realize such actions and activities are non- and counterproductive. So the object of language is not primarily to establish the superiority and dominance but to empower both. This is the language of the 21st century -- unlike that of the 20th century, dominated by the broadcast media, which gave rise to powerful propaganda campaigns because of this one-sided control of information and communications. That was the horror and abuse of media George Orwell, himself a journalist, warned the world about in his classics, Animal Farm and 1984.
When 1984 actually came around, the media proclaimed, “There is no danger here, everything is fine, we are in control.”
http://hawaiirepublican.blogspot.com/
No student should be without a copy of Elements of Style by Strunk and White.
Perhaps the best book ever written on how to write clear, concise, and gramatically correct prose is Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B White (and no, I'm not trying to talk Ebonics). The book is only 85 pages or so and covers just about everything you just said and a little bit more. A copy sits behind my desk and I assign it as mandatory reading to all new employees.
I have been told, write as you speak.
But, if you talk funny to begin with, the trouble is never finished.
As a ramdon observation of the above, have you noticed how non-primary English speakers tend to write, say, in email or the like?
I find it difficult to write and speak at the same time.
In other words, William F. Buckley would be more effective if more people easily understood what he was saying?
LOL!
The most lucid current writers/speakers/thinkers that I can think of are Milton Friedman, Alan Keyes, Paul Johnson and Peter Kreeft.
Dostoevsky gets my nomination for the greatest author in history. And the most lucid and profound writer of all time has to be St. Thomas.
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