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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

The whole description is wordy but astonishing.

It is strange that the part that strikes me the most though is this one:

"The Coast Guard amphibian gained altitude and flew off. (I learned later that he headed for a squadron of minesweepers that was returning to the United States from a tour of the Western Pacific. He was unable to tune to their radio frequency for communications. But this ingenious pilot lowered a wire from his aircraft and dragged it across the bow of the minesweeper, the USS Embattle. The minesweeper captain understood the plea, and veered off at top speed in my direction.)"

That is such a fascinating operational ingenuity by the pilot and the captain, I am thoroughly impressed!

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> The whole description is wordy

I for one really enjoyed reading this story, it was quite exciting and I never noticed anything 'wordy' about it. I thought it was very well written.

I meant it as a relatively neutral descriptor.

In modern day and age, this would frequently be shared as a 20word phrase on tranquil image background on Facebook.

Compared to that, this is "wordy" - which some of us will enjoy (I did too:), others will not.

If your definition of "wordy" is "anything longer than a 20 word phrase", I mean, I don't know what to say really. Your response to OP was definitely wordy then. And so is this response.

You've basically redefined the word so that it no longer has any meaning.

I think your response was sarcastic but I actually fully agree - yes language changes, cultural & social norms change. Today in 2022, based on average of media creation & consumption, this article is wordy (or "long form", if we feel "wordy" is loaded with negative connotation:). It would not have been wordy in different times & places.

I like long form. I like essays and articles and geeking out and getting in depth of things. But I'm not oblivious that majority of media consumption is swiping on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook.

"I like twitter"

I want to believe that there is still an audience for long form. Besides, great debates can't be carried out with 20-word pieces. Long form blogs of the web 1.0 were instrumental for the tech environment we have today. I would say that "you want to make articles as short as possible, but not shorter" [0]

[0]https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/374887/meaning-o...

I feel there's perception that by labeling this article as "wordy", I have also made far more reaching implicit claims such as

* Wordy is bad

* There's no room in this world for wordy/long-form

* I am a proponent of 20-word Facebook posts, they are awesome and a pinnacle of human achievement and we should all use them going forward

I have not made such a claim in the initial post and have made substantial effort to explicitly indicate thusly since. Lord knows nobody ever labeled me as "succinct" :-D

My old co-worker had a term "We are in violent agreement", and I feel that's what's happening here :->

Indeed I felt that way too when reading passages such as:

"As I was looking around, I was struck for an instant by the eeriness of the scene: here I was, attached, like an unwanted child, by an umbilicus to a gargantuan mother who was fleeing across the sky at 200 knots as though from some unnamed danger. Far below us was a broken layer of clouds that filtered the sun glare over the Pacific."

Wonderfully poetic and I enjoyed it, but yes, wordy.

I'm glad you also enjoyed the story! In that case perhaps we just have a difference in our definitions, since I would interpret 'wordy' as implying some disapproval at an excess of words.

I was under the impression that for non-surfaced subs the only way to communicate them was to fly close to the surface and lower a boom into the water. Is that not the case?

Minesweepers are surface vessels

Oh good point. For some reason my mind was fixated on submarines lol.

These aren't subs, they are ships. I would imagine the plane circled overhead at a low altitude several times, tried to get their attention, kept going away and seeing if they would follow, kept going back when they didn't. And people on the ship were probably looking up being like, “what's his deal?”

A “shot across the bows” is a colloquial expression for a warning demanding imminent action. The idea was that long ago if you couldn't communicate with some other ship, your last ditch effort to tell them to stop “or else” was to fire a cannonball over the nose (the bow) of the ship, so that you do not damage the ship but they would definitely see it and know you mean business.

So I imagine someone on this plane using the colloquial expression was just like “dammit! Follow us!! What more of a shot across the bows do you need?!” And someone else was like “you mean a literal one? I have some cable here, you drag that a few meters above the deck I bet it will make a terrible noise.” or something.

The dynamics of how humans can communicate with each other, especially in spontaneous occasions like this, are so interesting.

From what you’re explaining, the expression wasn’t something necessarily standardized “code yellow” sort of thing. Could two novices been able to convey or comprehend the meaning between themselves?

With stories like this, who needs film!

> Could two novices been able to convey or comprehend the meaning between themselves?

Maybe not for a towed line, though the shot across the bow is probably intuitive. That's essentially the same thing bees will do to warn you away from their hive.

It's also possible that the ship was already aware of a lot of context, or perhaps after seeing the plane they called to another ship and got the story.

In German, we have almost the same expression, "ein Schuss vor den Bug." Literally, it translates to "a shot in front of the bow." I never thought about where it came from. Interesting to learn.

The expression has somehow always felt more like a frontal attack that stops right before actually hitting you. But my head may have conflated it with "jemandem etwas vor den Latz knallen," which translates to "slap something in front of somebody's bib."

Even without that--if an aircraft that I have identified as an emergency services craft indicates a direction to me I'm going to figure there's some reason I should be heading in that direction. They clearly know something I don't.

Submarines under the surface can receive VLF signals. The signals are broadcast from either land stations[0], or aircraft[1] trailing a 5-mile-long wire antenna (the aircraft fly in a circle so the antenna is mostly vertical). Subs can extend a long antenna below the surface in order to receive the signals[2].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lualualei_VLF_transmitter 1. https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1312134472280633345 2. https://twitter.com/thenewarea51/status/1347668162406477824

It's like Lassie barking at the family that Timmy has fallen down a well.

I didn’t understand this, is “lowering a wire” an expression? did the airplane just literally throw a very long comms cable to the minesweeper? How did they “understand the plea” and knew where to go?

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