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The
City on the Edge of Forever
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Library
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Lazy
Feed Two
Ever wish we could do the Vulcan Mind
Meld? Ya *dreamy* just bypass
this cumbersome stuff we call language and go straight to the heart of
the matter...
"This thing you call language, though... most remarkable. You
depend
on it for so very much, but is any one of you really its master?" -
Spock/Kollos from Is There In Truth No Beauty?
From time to time I like to think that I can wank words well, even work
a wonder or two... but the truth is I'm a hack. *sighs*
So be it. Hack I am and Hack I shall be...
To illustrate my point I'm willing to wager that a reasonable
percentage of you saw the word "hack" and the first thing that popped
into your little pointy heads was "hacking" computers, yes?
Whereas in
my pointy little head I hear the word "hack" and the image of a really
bad / cheap writer looms up at me...
The upshot of alla that is that the original sentence, crystal clear to
me, totally failed to clearly communicate to some people...
And that means I have to add additional language to clarify what should
be a rather simple concept...
Which just ticks off and bores the people who got it in one, and adds
the very real risk of gumming up the works with additional plumbing,
losing that simple concept in a maze of dribble.
In short; it ain't easy. *laughs*
In grade school we did a deliciously messy and delightfully fun
experiment. Our teacher procured numerous loaves of bread,
jars
of
peanut butter and jelly, plastic knives, spoons, forks, paper plates,
napkins, and brought the whole shebang into class.
Needless to say we were all more than a little curious about this.
She then told us to write down ALL of the instructions needed to "make
a peanut butter and jelly sandwich".
Simple concept, yes?
This was sixth grade. We were "big kids", we knew all about
peanut
butter and jelly sandwiches. Most (if not all) of us had
actually
made
a sandwich or two in our time. This was going to be "easy"
*grins*
We were given paper and pencils, we sat down and wrote out our
instructions, then handed them in.
The teacher then took our instructions, stood at the front of the class
behind a large table full of alla the stuff, and began to follow our
instructions To The Letter.
Only ONE kid in the class got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich like
mom makes (and it wasn't me).
The rest of us got ooey gooey masses of sticky goodness...
Tasty,
sure, but NOT what we had envisioned when we wrote down our
instructions.
Among other things, that little lesson taught me to be (perhaps) more
verbose than I need to be...
To me, being "clear" AND "concise" is usually an oxymoron.
Sure,
there
are occasions where a simple "yes" or "no" will suffice, but they are
few and far between, and seldom relate to anything of real significance.
*sploosh*
twj
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