Interesting Links for 26-10-2015

[andrewducker]

• Things Not To Do In Bed
  • (tags: sex advice funny )
• The cost of replacing Trident is really £167bn, new figures suggest
  • (tags: nuclearweapons UK )
• I am now officially terrified of Mississippi
  • (tags: usa republicans poverty religion )
• I agree with this review of Crimson Peak (Good, pretty, could have been so much better)
  • (tags: review movies

Comments

[steer]

"Write Like You Talk" this person has never spent any time with academics. His examples of sentences that would raise eyebrows seem like they come from a guide to writing plain English.

[steer]

I think the guy's campaign is going completely the wrong way. We should talk like the quoted people write. Imagine how brilliant that would be. It would be like living in a Jack Vance novel.

To take a quote from wikiquote

You must save yourselves,” Rogol Domedonfors told them. “You have ignored the ancient wisdom, you have been too indolent to learn, you have sought easy complacence from religion, rather than facing manfully to the world.”

What a world it would be to live in.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jack_Vance

[steer]

Oh, and that page includes one of my favourite bits of Vance:

"What are your fees?" inquired Guyal cautiously.

"I respond to three questions," stated the augur. "For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue."

[andrewducker]

That's fantastic!

[steer]

I think it's just brilliant. It captures both the playful strangeness of Vance's fantasy at its best but also the byzantine and convoluted ways in which his characters speak.

[makyo]

If the Economics department don't very soon get around to (a) sending me this year's contract and (b) paying me for the teaching I'm currently doing for them, then I'm going to adopt this policy myself.

[steer]

Hmm... I have great respect for economics and econometrics as a science but I'm not sure they wouldn't be tempted by the cheaper options: "the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity" or even "a parable which you must interpret as you will"... Indeed when it comes to making time series predictions, these two might be preferable.

[nancylebov]

There was a parody of Vance (possibly by Richard Lupoff) which included a curse of vocabulary restriction.

[steer]

I think that for many of them that would be crueller than the spell of forlorn encystment (that teleports the victim to a bubble several miles underground).