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Comment by Biologist123 | Hacker News Reader

I sent the essay to several people, and a few wrote back to say they thought the writing excellent. This is not to undermine your point of view. You’re perfectly entitled to it. Rather to wonder what it is that causes different tastes and preferences to form so deeply.

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It was sloppy, in the sense of not making sense in a few places. At first something was "the naval" of something, when it should obviously have been the navEl, and then towards the end there were suddenly sixty years in stead of twenty-four between parts I and II of Goethe's Faust: Something about how the painting _Faust on the Mountain_ was painted ~"two decades after part I and four before part II". Yeah, four years before; not decades. And there was at least one more equally daft thing, that I can't recall now, in between.

Such sloppiness (or just plain lacking grasp of language) doesn't mesh well with the high-falutin' style attempted; it adds up.

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ETA: Oh yes, now I remember: "Blah blah Mephistopheles and Faust, blah blah, the former having sold his soul to the latter." Or if it was "Blah blah Faust and Mephistopheles, blah blah, the latter having sold his soul to the former." Any which way they wrote it, I'm pretty sure it was the other way around.

Just to reassert: Makes it damn hard to take the whole thing seriously, and certainly makes the style more grating.

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