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Comment by GMoromisato | Hacker News Reader

"He walked up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"

"He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"

"He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"

"He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"

Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version.

Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/replace by thesaurus. But I think different words have different connotations, even if they mean roughly the same thing. Writing would be poorer if we only ever used "walk".

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I know you know everything I'm about to write, but I read a lot of dubious quality fiction. It needs to be made clear that if the butler "strides" up to Helen, then I, the reader, am expecting him to eject her from the party, tell her that her car is on fire, or something equally dramatic. The writer can subvert this expectation, but must at least acknowledge that it exists. The butler can stride up to Helen with a self-important sniff and welcome her to the house, but he can't just stride up for no reason: the striding must be explained and it must be relevant to the rest of the story.

Conveying meaning is the whole problem here. An unexpected word choice is a neon sign saying "This is important!" and it disappoints the reader if it is not.

Yes, that's a great way of explaining it, and I 100% agree.

People shouldn't use "strides" just because "walked" is boring. They should use "strides" when it's meaningful in the context of the story.

I remember as a younger teen my parents got me a workshop seminar with maybe 10 other kids with a fairly acclaimed author.

"You probably remember your English teacher saying 'the word 'said' is boring, use something different. Yes, find something else, if it makes more sense. But the word 'said' is a perfectly good word."

Between stride and walk, it seems like it would be unusual for any character in a romance novel to merely walk rather than stride. If anything the simple walk would need explanation.

Agreed. As always, it depends on what the author is trying to convey. At the first meeting, you probably do want to describe the walk in a way that reveals the character's inner motivation. Are they excited to walk up to the woman? Scared? Bored? They would walk differently depending on the feeling.

But a different scene might be better with the pedestrian "walk". Imagine that the main character enters the woman's office with an ostentatious bouquet of flowers. In that scene, maybe the emphasis is on the flowers or on the reaction of the woman or her co-workers. In the scene, a simple "he walked" might work best.

The Hawaiian language has a concept called Kaona, which is essentially embedding deeper meanings in contextual word choices. It can go way beyond the literal meaning of the words, and tie into bigger concepts of culture, lineage, and places. It's super cool hearing about it from native speakers.

We don't really do it intentionally in English, at least to the same degree. But there's still a lot of information coded in our word and grammar choices.

In English the word is “connotation.”

you know, I feel like we don't actually do that so much these days. It's simply too likely that the receiving party is going to take you at face value or make up their own deeper meaning.

Take irony / sarcasm / satire. They're pretty dead compared to what they used to be. I can recall a time when just about everything had subtext, but now you kind of have to play it straight. You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because anyone listening will just think you agree with them.

It's Poe's law across the board. World news brought to you by Not The Onion(tm).

> You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because anyone listening will just think you agree with them.

You absolutely can, if you are actually dealing with people listening, because sarcasm is signalled with (among other things) tone (the other things include the listeners contextual knowledge of the speaker.)

You can't do it online, in text, where the audience is mostly strangers who would have to actively dig into your history to get any contextual sense of you as a speaker, because text doesn't carry tone, and the other cues are missing, too.

And by “you can’t”, I mean “you absolutely can, but you have to be aware of the limitations of the medium and take care to use the available tools to substitute for the missing signalling channels”.

It's a matter of degree. You're right, of course, but there was a time not so long ago when such things were ubiquitous - even on the internet. Once upon a time, even the darkest corners like 4chan were actually kind of tongue-in-cheek. Then it slowly dawned on everyone that there were a bunch of people there who weren't kidding, and things kind of went to pot.

In a reversal of the aphorism; those were more complex times. I miss them.

It’s not even really a problem of the Internet necessarily; it’s rather a symptom of the growing political divide in Western society. Things are “simple” now because we’ve reached the point where nuanced discussion is pointless. In Europe you can be jailed for going against the Accepted Opinions™, and we’re seeing a rise in politically motivated attacks. There is no logical solution to emotionally backed rhetoric like we’ve seen with the Turtle Island terrorists; you can’t debate ethics with someone who wants you dead.

Who are the Turtle Island terrorists? I only know of four people accused of attempting to build a bomb, but not actually having done so.

Surely you aren't taking a government at its word on a politically charged case? Need we trudge out the Chicago 7 again?

By their own words they were going to commit terrorism. That, logically, makes them terrorists. They were found, on film, to be making and experimenting with illegal explosives, and they were found to own even more materials. If you have trustworthy evidence that this is all fabrication—evidence that doesn’t exist in your mind—then I’d be more than happy to see it.

And if you’re saying all of this because you agree with them and their actions, at least have the courage to state you support terrorism directly.

> Once upon a time, even the darkest corners like 4chan were actually kind of tongue-in-cheek.

I distinctly remember both the invention of q-anon and the idea of Trump as a presidential candidate happening on 4chan as a we're-all-in-on-it joke, until true believers started showing up and thinking we believed too. Not a joke anymore...

> I distinctly remember both the invention of q-anon and the idea of Trump as a presidential candidate happening on 4chan as a we're-all-in-on-it joke

4chan was created in 2003. Trump's first bid for the Presidency was an attempt at the Reform Party nomination dropped early in the primary season—in 2000, the one cycle when that party had access to federal matching funds but wasn't effectively a vehicle for H. Ross Perot. Another Trump bid was a recurring topic of discussion in serious, if speculative, contexts ever since (and, for that matter, the idea of a Trump presidential run had been even before the first bid, back to the 1980s, as I recall.) It certainly is not an idea that first emerged as a 4chan joke.

Trump running wasn't a 4chan joke, but support of him was.

Also, thank you for encouraging me to read the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Reform_Party_presidential....

You're right, there's absolutely no sarcasm ever seen on the internet or anywhere else. These days if you say something sarcastic they throw you in jail!

These days

Feel like this debate might be way different for novel writing vs every day writing.

I’m biased because I am not a very good writer, but I can see why in a book you might want to hint at how someone walked up to someone else to illustrate a point.

When writing articles to inform people, technical docs, or even just letters, don’t use big vocabulary to hint at ideas. Just spell it out literally.

Any other way of writing feels like you are trying to be fancy just for the sake of seeming smart.

>> Just spell it out literally.

Spelling it out literally is precisely what the GP is doing in each of the example sentences — literally saying what the subject is doing, and with the precision of choosing a single word better to convey not only the mere fact of bipedal locomotion, but also the WAY the person walked, with what pace, attitude, and feeling.

This carries MORE information about in the exact same amount of words. It is the most literal way to spell it out.

A big part of good writing is how to convey more meaning without more words.

Bad writing would be to add more clauses or sentences to say that our subject was confidently striding, conspiratorially sidling, or angrily tromping, and adding much more of those sentences and phrases soon gets tiresome for the reader. Better writing carries the heavier load in the same size sentence by using better word choice, metaphor, etc. (and doing it without going too far the other way and making the writing unintelligibly dense).

Think of "spelling it out literally" like the thousand-line IF statements, whereas good writing uses a more concise function to produce the desired output.

Those examples were simple, so it’s less of an issue, but if the words you use are so crazy that the reader has to read slower or has to stop to think about what you mean…then you aren’t making things more concise even if you are using less words.

For sure! Every author should know their audience and write for that audience.

An author's word choices can certainly fail to convey intended meaning, or convey it too slowly because they are too obscure or are a mismatch for the the intended audience — that is just falling off the other side of the good writing tightrope.

At technical paper is an example where the audience expects to see proper technical names and terms of art. Those terms will slow down a general reader who will be annoyed by the "jargon" but it would annoy every academic or professional if the "jargon" were edited out for less precise and more everyday words. And vice versa for the same topic published in a general interest magazine.

So, an important question is whether you are part of the intended audience.

Agreed.

Brevity is the soul of good communication.

Non-native English speaker here.

I would not understand the last two sentences. Sidle? Tromp? I don't think I've seen these words enough times for them to register in my mind.

"Strode", I would probably understand after a few seconds of squeezing my brain. I mean, I sort of know "stride", but not as an action someone would take. Rather as the number of bytes a row of pixels takes in a pixel buffer. I would have to extrapolate what the original "daily English" equivalent must have been.

English is hard, even for native speakers. But it's also wonderful! English loves to steal words from other languages, and good writers love to choose the right word. It's like having an expansive wardrobe and picking just the right outfit for every event.

Bad writers, of course, pick a word to make them seem smarter (which, of course, often fails). That's what the OP was complaining about: using a fancy word just to impress.

But "stride" is not just a fancy version of "walk". When a person strides they are taking big steps; their head is held high, and they are confident in who they are and where they're going.

"Sidle" is the opposite. A person who sidles is timid and meek; they walk slowly, or maybe sideways, hoping that no one will notice them.

And "tromp," of course, sounds like something heavy and dour. A person who tromps stamps their feet with every step; you hear them coming. They are angry or maybe clumsy and graceless.

> English is hard, even for native speakers. But it's also wonderful! English loves to steal words from other languages, and good writers love to choose the right word. It's like having an expansive wardrobe and picking just the right outfit for every event.

Very true. Take this passage:

‘I am called Strider,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Master – Underhill, if old Butterbur got your name right.’

In an early draft Tolkien used a different word as the character was originally a hobbit, rather than a long-legged Ranger:

‘I’m Trotter,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Mr — Hill, if old Barnabas had your name right?’

A very different book that would have been! Where can I read more?

His son Christopher spent his whole life editing and organising all his father's unfinished works.

The bulk of that was the History of Middle Earth of which a few volumes cover LoTR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_The_Lord_of_the...

That works transversally accross languages though

You can always choose uncommon more descriptive words

In spanish you could say "repare algo" ("I fixed") or "parapetee algo" ("I Jury-rigged") and plenty would not know of the cuff what the second one means

People either know, look it up or figure it out via context

Mark Twain on this subject:

> Well, also he will notice in the course of time, as his reading goes on, that the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

But also:

> Unconsciously he accustoms himself to writing short sentences as a rule. At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but he will make sure that there are no folds in it, no vaguenesses, no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole.

Very much agree. In the rush to "simplify" writing, we've stripped out a lot of the colour in the prose and made it boring. Sentences have a certain rhythm which becomes even more apparent when they're read out loudly or performed by someone with good vocal training.

I can see the appeal in, perhaps, technical writing but even there, I feel that there's room to make the prose more colourful.

You forgot:

"He waddled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"

"He scrambled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"

"He kick-flipped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"

[edit] electric-slid! Pirouetted! Somersaulted!

Maneuvered, marched, slid over to, snuck up on/to, rolled on up to, ambled, thread his way through the crowd to, slithered, slunk. Pimp walked. Danced over to. Hopped over to. Sprinted! Jogged! Charged!

He rolled away on his heelys.

Crunched.

Glomped. Oozed.

He vermiculated obliquely toward Helen, and from a yet comfortable distance mumbled a barely audible request for permission to ask how she's doing.

wodehouse loved ejaculated

Me too

Scooted!

Sashay…

Let's not forget "sashayed" and "marched"

"slunk"

I love sashayed. It's always accompanied with a mental image of a person clad in some silk, floor length robe who walks a slightly sidewards, the fabric whispering. I have no idea where that image came from, but it's always there.

Somehow that’s not far off from my mental image.

Even more simply:

"God rest ye merry gentlemen" changes in tone and meaning depending on where you put the comma in that sentence.

My best guess is they lean so hard on “strode” because they are trying to convey “this character is confident” and aren’t very good at it. So you’ll get like ten “strodes” in a short novel. Everyone’s “strode”ing into every room they enter.

"minced" would never be used in such fiction.

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