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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Similar thoughts here. Furthermore, the author's writing style is annoyingly old fashioned and unnecessarily long.

>Like the man—the fellow with the name Solomon, writing under the pen name Ecclesiastes—said, “Of the making of many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh

Why not just "Solomon, writing under the pen name 'Ecclesiastes', said..."?

> I recall some years ago a politician whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history who listed reading among his hobbies, along with fly-fishing and jogging.

What was the point of this? Why not just "reading is my hobby"?

> But for the road to acquiring the body of unspecialized knowledge that sometimes goes by the name of general culture, sometimes known as the pursuit of wisdom, no map, no blueprint, no plan, no shortcut exists, nor, as I hope to make plain, could it.

Had to read this 3 times to parse the grammar.

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Why not just "Solomon, writing under the pen name 'Ecclesiastes', said..."?

Saying "the man" and then following up with "the fellow with the name" emphasies that who he was is less important than what he said; the fact that it's Solomon, writing Ecclesiastes (two names widely recognised in the Western canon) serve to emphasise this. EVEN THOUGH it's written by someone famous in a famous book, what he wrote is STILL more important than who he was. That is part of the meaning here. There's another level to it, as well; the author is well aware that he's out on a limb here and his jovial tone makes it clear that he's not taking himself too seriously.

Stripping it down to just "Solomon, writing under the pen name 'Ecclesiastes', said..." changes the meaning.

I suppose he could have explicitly said "Here are some words written by the famous person Solomon in the famous book Ecclesiastes, but the words are more important than who he was and the book he wrote, and I'm telling you this because it makes it clear how much more important the words are than the origin of them, but don't take me too seriously on this folks!" but that seems clunky.

If the goal was to make the fact that the man who said those words is not important while the words are, why not just not mention Solomon or Ecclesiastes in the first place.

Stating that the person who said it is Solomon, and then making it clear that the speaker is less important that the words, serves to emphasise what is important.

The man who wrote it DOES matter, it DOES alter the effect. Solomon wrote it, in the book Ecclesiastes! Of course that makes a difference, and the writer here deliberately drew our attention to that. Dismissing a famous writer as unimportant carries more weigh than dismissing a complete unknown as unimportant.

This isn't some kind of simple logical operator statement that one can apply Boolean algebra to and simplify. This is already massively simplified; the writer expressed a lot of meaning in very few words. So much meaning, so compressed, that many readers think it's just the opposite - little information in too many words! People asking why this wasn't short are missing the fact that this IS the short version!

There always seems to be someone on HN willing to bemoan any prose style that aspires above the perfect perfunctoriness of API documentation.

Orwell would have written superb API documentation.

(Even if every deprecated end-point was described having a faint smell of boiled cabbage.)

Come on, this is not Joycean or Faulknerian stuff.

Not quite. Many authors hot the mark for me. Neil gaiman, Stephenson, Peter Watts, doctorow, all write prose eloquently without getting obtuse.

> > I recall some years ago a politician whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history who listed reading among his hobbies, along with fly-fishing and jogging.

> What was the point of this? Why not just "reading is my hobby"?

The point was that he considered reading a "hobby" as much as breathing for himself. You have to include the rest of that paragraph though to see it:

> I recall some years ago a politician whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history who listed reading among his hobbies, along with fly-fishing and jogging. Reading happens to be my hobby, too, along with peristalsis and respiration.

I don't really want to pile on, but the irritating part is "whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history". It's still irritating in the context of the paragraph you quoted.

> “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind.

From later in the article. I took the "whose name is now as lost" as a forward reference to the later concept. Reading so much that specific facts are lost (like who he was quoting) while retaining the understanding of the quote itself.

He is making the point that in your lifetime you experience a long procession of politicians and other celebrities who are thought important for a while and are then forgotten. That is why, as he says later (twice), he is not interested in reading thick biographies of formerly famous politicians.

I think some commenters here are missing the intended tone of the article. It's supposed to be a confection, an amusing and self-deprecating defense of his old-fangled preferences, with a melancholy tinge about running out of time (the author is in his eighties).

How so? It's clearly linking the idea that the person's name being lost to history is connected to being the type of person who lists reading on the same level as other incidental hobbies.

It reads as haughty, overwrought, and cliche to me. To each their own I suppose.

> Why not just "Solomon, writing under the pen name 'Ecclesiastes', said..."?

Talk about annoyingly old fashioned and unnecessarily long. Let’s try:

“Solomon aka Ecclesiastes said...”

In reply to both yours and the original post, the writer does that because he is slyly signalling to you feigned humbleness with a little wink to his readers with respect to the personage of Solomon.

You know, using language for subtle humor rather than just brevity, which, if i recall correctly, he actually discussed this topic and dismisses the speed readers and those always looking for efficiency and speed: like speed eating or speed sex I believe the analogy was.

I was poking fun at the guy I was replying to – not making a modest proposal that fewer words is always the ideal.

The comment you're replying to is sarcastic.

A good rule of thumb is to assume all of my posts are sarcastic.

A good rule of thumb is to write your posts so they convey sarcasm to a reader who doesn't know you personally.

Great advice!

How was that?

That's funny; none of mine are.

At least you thought I was funny.

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