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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

"The continual use of slang expressions is an evidence of mental laziness, and I will not hire a man who depends upon slang to express his meaning. It is a substitute for exact thinking."

I found this to be an unusual warning. Is "proper speech" really just a proxy for class in that time period? I'm now very curious about 1920s slang, especially its frequency of use in business settings.

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Compare the comments on this site with the ones you see on reddit, where a sarcastic one-liner or a good meme reference can get thousands of upvotes. From my experience of actually writing comments on reddit that have gotten thousands of points - the less thought you put into them the better they'll do. The same is not true on HN where long and well thought out comments do better, and one-liners often get moderated. In my opinion, HN comments are much more valuable as a whole because of that.

I must be in the lower echelons of this secret HN club, because I cannot see the score on any comment. I thought it was the general and public absences of meaningless internet points that kept the comment system of HN in check.

You can't see the score on other people's comments, but if you click your username at the top you can see the scores for your own.

High scores rise to the top, but the scores are kept unobtrusive so they don't become the focus.

Slang is slang. It was then, it is now, and it should be easy to understand his meaning. Besides, this man professedly runs a grocery store and says his best hires were muscly delivery boys (rather than college students). So I quite doubt he is being elitist and hiring only those of high class.

It's a conscious decision to appear different than the blue collar folks.

The point stands though. Slang is often used as an attention grabber or distractor. Like a comedian who curses a lot to shock you, which conceals that he doesn't really have anything to say.

Ugh - everyone speaking extremely carefully, making sure to use language like they would a math proof, makes for a very boring world. Just get the fucking point across; that's effective communication. Slang can be VERY good at fulfilling that.

I read 'slang' as buzzwords, and I think that statement is equally valid today.

I read slang also as linguistics crutches, like saying "cut to the chase" when you really meant to say "please speak plainly", which itself is a nice version of "just tell me the truth".

Linguistics are an interesting thing, especially with geeks. Often, their analytical minds concoct elaborate sentences, which, like algorithms, are abstractions over many little things. I prefer the plain talker, the man who has seen the cathedral of long sentences and has realized only the priests understand him.

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