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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

This essay is fantastic at demonstrating that putting a word length limit actually makes explaining things more complicated. I got lost at around chapter 5 because the author couldn't use words like "gravity" and "acceleration" and I got confused by which one is "new pull" and which one is "old pull". It's too bad, as it was interesting up to that point.

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There’s a reason why vocabulary exists. It isn’t to make things harder to understand. Sometimes the best way to explain something to someone with a limited vocabulary is to expand their vocabulary in the process.

To expand the vocabulary, you'd still need to break down 'gravity' and 'acceleration' into simpler words. Though still easier without an arbitrary length limit. You could say, "change in the speed a thing moves" but that needs five or six letters.

Of course you find it hard to distinguish the two! You don't have equipment for measuring tidal forces, and they are locally indistinguishable.

Of sure you find it hard to tell the two away! You lack the gear for tide pull test, and they feel the same here and local.

I hate this.

The new pull and the old pull both just feel like a pull, if you can only feel the pull at one spot. To see how the old pull is not like the new pull, you have to test the pull at a spot near you (but not the same spot), too. The new pull will be the same at each spot, but the old pull may not be the same (we call this the tide), and you test the sum of the new and old pull.

(This is hard.)

It's fair that it's hard to keep the two from becoming the same in your head, you need fancy stuff to test for the force of the tide, and they are more or less the same from a close-up (any which is much closer than, say, the moon) view!

(Verbosity is your friend)

It's an exercise. I would have much preferred using the 20k most common words or something like that. The first thing that came to mind is "elevator" which is where the equivalence eureka comes from. It can be done in British English as "lift" but difficult otherwise.

Elevators are cool like telephone booths. I've wondered what a dog thinks using them for the first time, then accepting what they do and how much they understand its geometries.

Reminds me of Guy Steele making the point about big languages and small ones in his talk about Scheme. Started the whole lecture using only one-syllable words then gradually defined two-syllable words using only single syllables and so on.

Ah, I take it that's "Growing a Language"?

> It's too bad

I think that's the whole point. It was never meant as being easier to grok

What was it meant as?

A statement on the value of vocabulary, perhaps.

There was a talk at a university, where the presenter used only words of two or less SYLABLES , but he allowed himself to use more complicated words after explaining them (but kept that to a minimum).

I can't find either the author or the talk. I think it was some 5 years ago.

At first, I thought it was Randall Munroe, but I might be remembering this: https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

I've also tried with Paul Graham, who has some articles trying to convey something similar, but no luck there.

Edited to add : I think the original proponent of a similar idea was Richard Feynman : https://www.hpcdan.org/reeds_ruminations/2022/03/understandi...

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