But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy
Speaking of the fatuous claim that Good Writing is Simple Writing, I was tempted to quote a bit of Sir Thomas Browne on that post but didn’t, but now that Tim Harris has cited him as a counter-example I have to.
I give you: Hydrotaphia, or Urn Burial, published in 1658:
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian’s horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations, and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon without the favour of the everlasting register. Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? The first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah’s long life had been his only chronicle.
Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up the first story and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox? Every hour adds unto that current arithmetick, which scarce stands one moment. And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementoes, and time that grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration;–diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.
Go ahead, tell me that would be better if it were all short words.
My working life was spent in the milieu of legal writing. Legal writing is burdened with repetitive phrases and frequently uninteresting topics, not to mention peculiar terms of art. Nevertheless, I strove to make what I wrote clear and understandable. When concepts are complex, that can’t always be achieved in single-syllable words. And use of descriptors can make something otherwise tedious into something that is meaningful and understandable.
Hey, when you die, no one’s gonna remember you long, bud.
Mostly one-syllable words.
Silly Ophelia. Everything would be better in Upgoer 5: https://xkcd.com/1133/
Is it not beautiful, and forceful because of it? Thank you, Ophelia,
Me too, but it’s important to distinguish between writing great literature and writing an instruction manual for a dishwasher. I choose that example because we had a new one installed this morning. I had a choice of reading the manual in French (OK) or German (not OK). For some reason they forgot the instructions in Latvian, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi and Chinese, not to mention English, and all the other languages instruction manuals have for most of the things one buys in France today.
Surprisingly enough the growth in population means that that may not be more than half true, and in some fields it’s definitely not true. I forget the exact figure, but something like 75% of all the scientists that have ever lived are alive today, and for software developers it’s probably more than 95%.
Yes, I had been wondering whether Browne was quite right about the balance between the living and the dead now.
I certainly think clarity important, but I do not find Thomas Browne’s prose unclear at all, though doubtless one wouldn’t want instructions for a dishwasher to be in that style, unless in a comedy . Another great writer of prose around that time was Sir Francis Bacon:
REVENGE is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’ s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out. For as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law; but the revenge of that wrong, putteth the law out of office. Certainly, in taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior; for it is a prince’s part to pardon….
But the thing about the passage by Browne is that, apart from everything else that renders it memorable, it has rhythm. It has the poetic “feel” of a good sermon, it ebbs and flows, the sentences always varying in length and beat, never boring the reader. It has alliterations (“since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementoes”) and those false oppositions that Hugo also loved to use two hundred years later (“the register of God”, “the record of man”). It constantly surprises, not in its argument but in the very texture of the text. There is no way, starting a sentence, that you can predict how it’s going to end.
It is not easy to read, for me at last, it requires frequent stops and re-scannings, and this is not helped by the slightly archaic language, but it is rewarding.
All this it is possible to accomplish using simple, monosyllabic words, I suppose. But not easily, and not for any length of time. And also: what would be the point? The beauty and complexity of language should be celebrated.
maddo1129@#1 I work for lawyers and outside of their documents, they do write clearly, as they have to explain points to clients without ambiguity. Clear writing is really dinned into them.
Arnaud@#8 Yes, it is a matter of rhythm. Read it out loud and hear how it sounds.
Tim @ 7 – again! As I read the first comments I thought “and you know who else? Bacon – I should add him.”
Another language-reveler, in a different style and far more obscure: Thomas Nashe.
A third, and I think I’ve mentioned him before: John Florio, who translated Montaigne’s essays.
It’s a matter of rhythm and of other things too. It’s a matter of luxuriating in words, and of saying the thing in multiple ways, and of illustrating it in multiple ways, and just of elaboration in general. Sure, the point can be made in a few words, and it can be made in fewer and plainer words as in Gray’s Elegy (John @ 9), but it doesn’t follow that it should or must always be made that way.
There’s a difference between writing clearly and writing simplistically. It’s all about your audience. Randall Monroe illustrates this brilliantly in many of his comics, that sometimes overly simplified writing begins to occlude meaning rather than illuminate.
If writing for a science log or popular science magazine, I assume a certain level of knowledge and understanding but don’t litter the text with more technical terms. But long, multi-syllabic words do not indicate complexity nor short one’s simplicity. For example, if I switch from using the word inflation to the word growth, have I added to the meaning? No, in fact I’ve changed the meaning slightly, perhaps even dramatically depending on the context or even rendered it meaningless. Economists would not use the two words interchangeably. Nor would a statistician.
I played with the idea a bit – this was a lot harder than I expected!
We randomized individuals into two groups and recorded their responses to Brexit-related news stories or pictures of kittens.
We put folk in two groups and wrote down what they thought of news about their home place’s daft view that the place with all the nice food that has been our friend for a long time and we buy and sell stuff with is now bad and we should not be their friend now and do our own thing to buy and sell stuff to and from places in the world or what they thought of small cats that were drawn on a screen by a smart box that put those things on screens.
Trying to describe things using only monosyllabic words is the point of the game Poetry for Neanderthals. It’s a fun game and quite a challenge.
https://shop.explodingkittens.com/products/poetry-for-neanderthals
Went for a walk on my own. Saw some yellow flowers. They were nice.
Ah, man, that gave me a laugh. You win the internets today, AoS.
Arnaud#8: That is wonderfully well put, and hits the mark.
And, yes, I agree, Claire, & think AoS wins the internets. I must admit I thought it was a quotation from Hemingway at first.
There is of course Shakespeare’s prose – Falstaff’s words, for example.
Milton has a way of moving out of complexity into simplicity and piercing directness at important points:
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour,
Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluckt, she eat:
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.
Thank, you two.
I think that comparing my version with the original helps answer that age-old question: what are words worth?
That’d be ‘thanks’.
There is yet another ‘version’ of ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, and it is in fact the original – an account in her Journals by Dorothy Wordsworth for April the 15th, 1802.
‘When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway.’
Wordsworth wrote his poem two years later, in 1804, and Dorothy was ‘disappeared’. The critic John Barrell, in an essay entitled ‘The Uses of Dorothy’, gives a good account of how William mined Dorothy’s Journals for his poetry. She was more observant than him.
She observed and wrote down her observations in beautiful, fresh prose; William subsequently provided the all-important moralising without which writing, particularly poesie, couldn’t be serious. The moralising got him in the end.
I love Dorothy W’s journal.
She reports the most stupendous walks, as if they were strolls to the corner to buy milk.
Via Project Gutenberg:
Sunday, 18th.—Went to church, slight showers, a cold air. The mountains from this window look much greener, and I think the valley is more green than ever. The corn begins to shew itself. The ashes are still bare. A little girl from Coniston came to beg. She had lain out all night. Her step-mother had turned her out of doors; her father could not stay at home “she flights so.” Walked to Ambleside in the evening round the lake, the prospect exceeding beautiful from Loughrigg Fell. It was so green that no eye could weary of reposing upon it.
Distance is 4.5 miles, for a total of 9.
Tuesday Morning.—A fine mild rain…. Everything green and overflowing with life, and the streams making a perpetual song, with the thrushes, and all little birds, not forgetting the stone-chats. The post was not come in. I walked as far as Windermere, and met him there.
Distance is 8.8 miles.