Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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You'll find that many authors have words, analogies, literary devices, etc that they go back to. It's part of having a voice.

I'm occasionally downright embarrassed by HNSearch. Easy example searches to demonstrate include [ROFLstomp], [pathological customer], [patio11 "charge more"], etc. Or, if you want things that take a little effort to spot, you can see that I really, really like parenthetical statements (one English teacher of mine estimated that I used them 20x more than her reference sets... oh, there I go again) and extended surprise expectation inversion as a device, particularly in introductions.

A related issue is that these two interviews were recorded with a 30 second break in between and, since the topics are spiritually adjacent and our memories were fresh, we both recycled good turns of phrase and ideas from the previous interview.

My favorite patio11 word is "motivational", although it's possibly a really new one.

Pet example: "They paid me motivational sums of money".

(Oh, and yes Patrick, you're starting to develop a serious cult following).

> Or, if you want things that take a little effort to spot, you can see that I really, really like parenthetical statements (one English teacher of mine estimated that I used them 20x more than her reference sets... oh, there I go again)

And I thought I was the only one (I have the same habit). It does make Lisp seem more familiar, though (rather than "ack, too many parentheses!").

P.S. Was surprised you didn't give out your summoner name on the last article. You probably could've gotten enough free RP for Midnight Ahri or whatever.

I believe that (ab)using parantesis are a side effect of having the engineer mind -- we have to quantify exactly what we mean, otherwise the mean compiler growl at us and so it becomes a habbit of our work.

I'm curious, what do you mean by "extended surprise expectation inversion"? Google didn't turn up much.

Explanation by way of example:

Teen pregnancy. School stabbings. Teacher abuse scandals. Classroom mayhem. Flat test scores. Declining graduation rates. It's enough to make Japanese parents wish their kids went to school in America.

(That is pretty much verbatim from an essay I wrote in college. I use this trick a lot.)

It's also functional, in the "tell me three times" sense. Effective teaching tends to involve lots of repetition.

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