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Comment by 1attice | Hacker News Reader

I'm considered eloquent and poetic and I hardly ever mean to be.

I appear to do this by 'throwing the dart wrong', and storing similar concepts adjacently.

Like I just did in the sentence above. I could have said, "choosing incorrectly from adjacent elements".

But I didn't; I chose the vivid, short, memorable form that came up first when reached for <unintentional variability in speech performance due to inefficient retrieval selection and poor discrimination between adjacent concepts>.

You'll remember the dart and the dartboard, not the phrase between angle-brackets above.

Slight errors can make you memorable, and eloquence is basically memorability

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I understand how you do it but I don't understand why that is eloquent and poetic. I wouldn't want someone to constantly choose related but incorrect concepts. That wouldn't really be a good communication, it seems to me.

If you want labels for misbehavior like that, check out Grice's maxims of conversation.

That you read unintentional variation as misbehaviour is like rejecting food not made at McDonalds.

Actually, this is a great teachable moment. This is the crux of it.

Engineers value precise repetition, what Deleuze calls 'mechanical' repetition.

Writing, like cuisine, is about 'difference that contains its own differencing', again, as Deleuze put it. (Sounds better in French but if you chew on it you can suck the meaning-marrow from the consonants).

Eloquence comes from the space between symmetries, which is why it's so hard for engineers to master.

Indeed, 'mastery' is already quite the wrong tenor

Your writing makes me think you're a bot.

And yet here I am, flesh and blood. I can't prove it; it's late 2022. Oh well.

You'd think so! But it works a little bit like 'constructive interference' in radio reception.

A little bit of cognitive brownian motion does wonders to warm up tone.

Speaking/writing like this comes off as pretentious to me. Have you heard that before?

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