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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's because English isn't my native language, but I didn't understand half the worlds in this article.

I mean, 'sedimentation'. What?

I find this a bit odd given that the article is about understandability and accessibility for the layman.

Sedimentation is a geological analogy, as rocks are laid down in layers of sediment and he is looking at the interface layers. It is not normal conversational English but is more of an educated style of writing which is faily common.

Keep at it!

I'm very fond of an article called "Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems with long words used needlessly", won an Ig Nobel prize in 2006 (http://personal.stevens.edu/~ysakamot/730/paper/simple%20wri...).

I agree that my being a non-native English speaker clearly makes the difference in this case, but "more of an educated style of writing" generally means "bad writing" to me. If there's a difficult ("educated") word and an easy word to choose from, there's absolutely no reason to choose the difficult one.

Often you are right, and that article points out some of that. And many people do write badly on purpose, or do not write well by not thinking about it. But simplified English is not going to catch on with English speakers, we enjoy our words too much. The fact that English has more words than any other language is due to constant borrowing from other languages and also constant invention nd reinvention. It is not just educated words, it is full of street words, dialect words, all sorts. And they do convey extra nuances. Look at Shakespeare or A Clockwork Orange for word invention. Of course though there is too much simply bad writing too...

The words in the article aren't particularly difficult for a native English speaker — certainly not 'sediment' — with the exception of 'palimpsest', for which he linked to the Wikipedia entry. With respect, I don't think it odd at all.

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