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Comment by causal | Hacker News Reader

> writes too elliptically

> Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice

Wow, what a great way of phrasing this. Thanks for word-smithing what I've been wanting to express for so long.

Follow up thought: I wonder if Claude is overtrained on academic papers, which often suffer the same kind of "prove how good I am at talking before getting to the point" prose.

Maybe just Calvin and Hobbes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/ky81y/verbing_...

This is hilarious - this week Claude’s writing was getting so bad I had this exact comic come to mind.

Briefly considered adding “Verbing weirds the English language - stop it!!!” to its instructions.

"Verbing": For some reason, to me the use of "impact" as a verb has always been fingernails on a chalkboard. But it's hard to see the distinction between that and using "access" as a verb (as in the linked C & H strip), which seems unremarkable.

If it was overtrained on academic papers it'd reiterate the point multiple times for structure. Instead, it's burying the lede seemingly just to pad.

It’s way harder to read because most of Claude’s sentences are hardly communicating anything at all, or are just completely inscrutable. I feel like academic papers are just boring

This just mimics what I call BusinessBro™ speech. It also goes the other way, they use verbs as nouns. "I know this is a big ask". "The solve for that is that we can...." When it was just my product owner in tech meetings, I'd mock him relentlessly "There's already a word for that, it's 'request'" or "Are you sure you didn't mean 'SOLUTION'?? words are hard man". (This was all in good fun, I still love the guy to pieces).

Which is worse, when people noun verbs, or when they verb nouns?

The is latters.

Verbing weirds languages (Calvin and Hobbes)

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