This.
I hate it when people use that - but if anything deserves it, it is "This."
I'm not religious, but that's how I felt.
He said "this" but then said he doesn't like using it but had to in this case because it just fit. I think this usage may have come from Reddit?
I remember seeing it on somethingawful as far back as 2003. They started a lot of memes, tl;dr, o rly? and so on.
(<small>if you don't get the joke...</small>)
Writing “this.” as a comment and then adding an apologetic explanation afterward is even worse, if that’s possible. If you need to write a sentence about the importance of something, how about writing something relevant instead of driving the conversation onto a tangent about commenting style.
* * *
Edit, since apparently this was unclear: it is obnoxious, to me (implied in my statement, though I’d guess it’s obnoxious to plenty of others as well). The danger with hackneyed phrases† and metaphors generally is that they encourage a lazy discussion style that decreases the signal-to-noise ratio. It is my personal experience that communities where usages like “this.” are popular are, on the whole, less relevant and interesting than ones where they aren’t. I don’t want people to start pulling quotations from linked articles as their entire comments, even if it might sometimes be appropriate, because when such comments are encouraged, the trend is toward banality and repetition.
† a hackneyed phrase itself. hah.
I regret posting what I did as this thread has devalued the original posting, and that was far from the intention; however your continued objections aren't helping this tangent from dieing down either. I'll be sure to consider your points in the future, I realize I could have approached it differently - can we let the subject die now and not lose any more focus on the original posting.
It's just language evolution at work.
And now I have added nothing to the actual topic, which was a somewhat irrelevant to HN but amazing discussion of life in Cairo this week. Sorry.
What's wrong with someone discussing why they think it's poor, and providing motivation to a 'this'-er to see why it's poor and changing their behaviour towards a more informative approach?
Particularly in an intellectual environment such as what HN wants to fill, why is it wrong to say 'please don't dumb down conversation, please inject content'? After all, screaming 'first post' and trolling are also natural social progressions, but they're frowned on too.
Educated people often perceive themselves as defending proper English or whatever against the uncouth hordes. One can see this in the arts, where the same people usually want to perpetuate classical forms. But once a form becomes classical it rarely produces much of lasting worth. Today's classical forms were yesterday's popular (or culturally marginal) forms, while yesterday's classical forms are mostly forgotten today. There are exceptions, of course, but this rule is remarkably stable. It took centuries for Shakespeare to be recognized as classic.
It's fun to note that this rule enables one to make some reasonable guesses. For example, it's more likely that our science fiction, comic books, and movies will be remembered centuries from now than it is that our literary novels will be. (Remember that the novel itself, at the time that the great European novels were being written, was regarded as a guilty pleasure - the way we regard, say, TV. Proper writers wrote drama in verse.) Ditto for rock and roll and hip-hop over orchestral music. And so on.
Once you see that railing against new linguistic forms is just one of those get-off-my-lawn complaints that are forever with us, much as the old always say that the young are ruining civilization, you become free to enjoy how things change. Real intellectual culture is closely connected to the marginal, lowly, and popular; it's pseudo-intellectual culture that wants to erect a wall against them.
This may be true of arts, but it's not true of science. A clearly articulated idea does not lose cachet with age. Science isn't about 'forms' and 'styles', it's about accurately describing the world around us. Newtonian mechanics are 'classical' and 'old-fashioned', yet they still provide much of lasting worth to this day.
Anyway, I think to some degree you misunderstand my issue, which is about content. "this" is contentless. It is chaff. Noise. Mental overhead. It adds nothing. I would much prefer to read a rambling paragraph by someone with a poor grammar, spelling, or even knowledge of whitespace if that person is providing some content. Encouraging people to provide content and not just fall back on memes and tropes contributes to intellectual discourse.
All the examples you give provide content of some kind. Encouraging content promotes thinking about content, which in turn gives rise to more sophisticated thought - regardless of crossed t's and dotted i's.
Perhaps an example. I'm Australian, and our previously monocultural British heritage offered us wordplay as a way of life. Every member of society used a variety of forms of metaphor to communicate, and double entendres (not necessarily sexual) were common, as was the process of being able to say more by what you left out. As we rejected the WAP and became multicultural (this is not a jab in that direction, just an explanation), the complexity of this communication has markedly simplified - speaking in metaphor in public is now truly dead here as the great unwashed can no longer perceive the true meaning (which once was plain as the nose on your face). The influx of US media helped simplify things here as well. The art of everyday reading-between-the-lines is wasting away.
So we /have/ lost something tangible here. It's not about 'correct English', but complexity and subtlety in the way we can communicate. Things are much more stark and pinned down now - good for scientific work which should always be utterly unambiguous, but for everyday use not so much fun.
So this has changed. I know that it has to be this way, and it would be unfair to immigrants to force them to engage in communication that takes decades to master just to take part in public life (enough barriers as is). But it is not an 'enjoyable' change.
Perhaps a simile would be: imagine that if to continue communicating you were forced to use words no longer than three syllables long. It's doable, but it's constraining and you lose flexibility of expression.
"Real intellectual culture is closely connected to the marginal, lowly, and popular; it's pseudo-intellectual culture that wants to erect a wall against them."
I couldn't disagree more. I hear the 'erect a wall' part, but the marginal, lowly, and popular are the ones who ridicule those who show intellect or talent. In my experience, the 'good' intellectuals are those who can relate to the common person, but they prefer to be with people who can 'get' them, can converse with them on an equal footing.
And a prime example: "This." is lowly and popular, but real intellectual culture - not hipsters, but real intellectual culture - does not favour it.
That would be why I was talking about the arts.
"this" is contentless. It is chaff. Noise. Mental overhead. It adds nothing
It's easy to see that this isn't always true. The "This" in elliotcarlson's original comment - for which he was reamed out and even felt obliged to ream himself out - wasn't contentless at all. Suppose instead he had written: "Here is the portion of the article that I found particularly significant." Nobody would have complained. Yet that would have been 10x as wordy and less idiomatic to boot. I knew what he meant when I read that comment and so, I bet, did nearly everyone else.
(I hope this subthread isn't too contentless. It's certainly offtopic. But language is intrinsically interesting, so I don't feel too bad adding to it.)
Is this not interfering with the way individuals choose to use language, molding language into what we want it to be rather than letting it be what it naturally falls to?
reddit's karma system is pretty much crap, so there's still an incentive for some people to use it on it.
I hate to jump on the pile, but since I value HN discussion, I'm happy to see "this" (usually) downvoted and put out of practice here.
I agree that this practice is bad, and it should be downvoted; which is why I have upvoted every single comment saying I shouldn't have posted it (though it bothers me that jacobolus downvoted all the people explaining my post - they were being helpful and should not have been downvoted imho).
I will make sure that my future contributions are of substance, and know that the route I took was a mistake.