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Comment by peter_l_downs | Hacker News Reader

> One control which we made for checks to reduce systemic risk continues to have consequences more than a century later. Most disagreements between you and a grocery store are beneath the notice of the law. If you and your grocery store have a disagreement about a check specifically, you can go to jail. The crime is sometimes called “uttering”, for charming historical reasons.

patio11: you write a lot, and have taught me a lot, and I appreciate it. But I want to make a small complaint. You frequently say things like "for charming historical reasons" and then _cite no sources_. Link something! Cite something! As a reader, I regularly feel like you are teasing me or showing off to me when you include all these small asides without any further reference or any concrete details.

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It's actually kind of boring in this case, per Wikipedia: "In law, uttering is synonymous with publication, and the distinction made between the common law offences was that forgery was the fabrication of a forged instrument (with the intent to defraud) and uttering was the publication of that instrument (with the intent to defraud)."

The distinction is a fact, but I haven't been able to find the _reason_ for the distinction, which I'm hoping is quite charming!

My guess is that it allows the prosecution of both the forger and the one who uses the forgery, the utterer I suppose, in cases where they are different individuals.

My passport says something like "to alter this instrument, or to utter it so altered, is an offence". This always read strangely to me - it's an offence to have a real passport, but claim it's a fake? But this definition of "utter" makes it work - it's a crime both to falsify the passport, and to attempt to travel with one that has been falsified.

Also, is there a particular reason he uses obscure words like "infelicity"? I'm a native English speaker and I think that is the first time I've heard that word used. Is it really that hard to just use "misfortune"?

There are more than a few people who value what he writes but find the overall "winding path" of style to be very grating to read.

I know it’s not the case but sometimes it feels like he’s trying to channel Matt Levine. Doesn’t matter, like you said his blog and now newsletter are fantastic.

Levine consistently makes the most boring subject interesting: and I don't find it obvious how he does it.

Certainly some of his subject matter is truly turgid (even Matt fails to make me interested in Musk's antics).

I am one such person. I have no issue reading obscure or difficult content (legal documents ala Companies Act 2006 to historical documents written in non-native languages). However, for me, his particular style forces me to read many things twice or thrice to determine whether or not I've understood him correctly.

Despite that, I still get a lot from his writing.

This is like criticizing someone's technical ability after they finished a Bob Ross painting course.

The point was joyful self-expression. You can go make your own painting with no happy little trees if you want.

> This is like criticizing someone's technical ability after they finished a Bob Ross painting course.

...no, it's a simple comment about a writing style. You don't need to try and make it out to be anything else.

It's very normal to still interact with things in life that aren't exactly how you'd want them to be. The overall net value of their content has spoken for itself over and over.

> You can go make your own painting with no happy little trees if you want.

Yet I won't, because I still want to read their content. That's the entire point.

I like the happy little trees.

If you’re the sort of writer who finds infelicitous historical reasons charming, you might find historical words like “infelicity” charming too.

His proclivity for sesquipedalianism, manifested in the substitution of "infelicity" for the more pedestrian "misfortune," may have been an artifice to inveigle the reader into a divergent mode of cogitation.

OK,

1) This is awesome :)

and

2) How much of this is you, and how much is ChatGPT? (Or a thesaurus?)

Still, I tip my hat to you! :)

They are unusual words, but not really obscure. I have always liked “inveigle”.

Probably just someone who likes to read older books. There have been a lot of so-called inkhorn terms in English; some made it into common use, some remained but are rare, some died on the vine.

Eschew obfuscation.

Write newspeak for goodthink.

“Can you explain a hard idea using only the ten hundred most used words? It’s not very easy. Type in the box to try it out.”

https://splasho.com/upgoer5/

An effort:

https://splasho.com/upgoer5/?i=Ez9loFOzo2kfo3qmVUEbMFOjo2yhq...

I really dislike this obsession with citations, as if every post is meant as a paper for a journal. I even dislike it in scientific papers (especially in the humanities, where most of the time it just lends false credibility "see, someone else said this too", and in some cases a paragraph ends up like a mashup of 5-6 excepts cited from others, complete with a footnote mark).

If we're interested in such a trivial matter as to why the crime was called "uttering" one can always look it up.

I looked it up and could not find the answer.

He doesn't always leave some footwork up to the reader.

Take this passage, for example, where the term "Clearing" is expanded upon:

> The UCC facilitated banks clearing each others’ checks. (“Clearing” is a magic finance word. Clearing a check refers to completing the process which the check agrees to: the writer sees money leave their account and the person depositing the check sees it enter theirs. This is much more complicated than it sounds in this quick gloss.)

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