Communicating a message using absolute terms leaves a stronger impression than if relative terms are used, but also makes the message more susceptible to failing under the scrutiny of fact-checkers. Words like "all", "always", and "every" usually trump words like "usually", "most", and "often", as far as a message's penetrating potential is concerned. You'll note that the prevalence of relative terms used to communicate the message of this particular post may contribute to its not being an especially memorable entry.
In an attempt to create a happy balance between leaving a strong impression and being immune to fact-checker scrutiny, someone amended an absolute term, with the result "almost always". Other excursions into this strategy yielded such gems as "nearly all" and "most every", the latter being a blatant fusion of the absolute and relative camps. While still used often, these shadowy, reality-re-framing concoctions of wordsmith trickery have fallen short of their high aspirations and, in practice, are no better at leaving a strong impression than is a purely relative term.
Both categories of words are as capable of being misused as of being used legitimately. Most people who season their messages with absolute or relative terms are aware, at the time of use, of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the spice. The more interesting cases are where salt is passed off as sugar. Someone who favors the relatives may be trying to appeal to a wider audience, or may be insecure about their knowledge and hoping to avoid being called out. Alternately, the misuse of absolutes might be an attempt by the message-giver to use the advantage of strong impression to win the audience over before fact-checkers have a chance to prove them wrong.
Save for the hybrid exceptions previously mentioned, which are really a separate sort of deal, one thing you'll rarely see is a message with both absolute and relative terms scattered throughout. In such cases, the content of the message risks being convoluted and is overshadowed by the impression that the message-giver is too complicated or conflicted, which confuses and annoys many people. Either drink vodka or visit with extended family, but not both at the same time.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
On A Grisly Hull
B) wins.
-Light your pipe, darling, the fire would like to see an ember of its family from a distance.
He had been observing his fingers pack moist Westminster Blend into the bowl. Leaving them to work blindly, he looked up and caught the latter portion of what had been a wry smile on her face, saw high-speed erosion massage the tensed muscles back to relaxed expression. Her eyes, though, continued to exude amusement.
How does she do it, he wondered, still watching her, how does she weave allusions to her greater agenda using tools available in the here and now?
-Alright, he relented, with some hesitation, alright, I know it's been a long interval since we last saw our son. How shall we approach Endinborough?
Endinborough, a place whose name had its roots in the unintended humor of a talkative scurvy sufferer; a poor, toothless bastard. One of several survivors previously part of a mutinous crew, he had entertained his listeners, the tavern clientele, with harrowing tales of stormy minds floating on stormy waters, conveying the narratives in solemn fits of urgency, preceding every trivial event with utterances a toothed person would pronounce as -and then; sending drunks, laughing, to the floor.
The settlement had grown healthily since those early days. Vessels at port brought merchants and laborers, silks and slaves. Livestock grazed nonchalantly under the sun, and their products were sold or traded at market daily. Clusters of limestone houses were carved out of the hillsides. But there existed a consensus as to the limit of how expansive Endinborough could comfortably become, and its streets, characteristically straight and rigid, jostled irritably here and there as one moved further from the Center Square, finally breaking, defiantly, into full-fledged snaking paths that traced the coastline to other townships.
A)
She looked at him directly, saw into him.
-By water, she said, resolute.
-Would you say the same if it weren't now raining? he asked, wondering if the water of the weather had somehow influenced her by association.
-Yes, she said. I want to feel myself a part of the sea.
-I only wonder, though, if this rain foreshadows a tumultuous time of it.
-Darling, she said, reassuringly, things are not so literary.
B)
-How was it we went last? she asked.
-I don't recall...but a few puffs of this pipe might jog my memory.
He placed the pipe bit between his teeth, struck a match, brought the flame down to the bowl and drew in shallowly several times, brow furrowed. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and exhaled smoke.
-No, he said, but I now have a pleasant flavor in my mouth, and am welcoming a comfortable fatigue.
-It smells delicious, she said.
C)
Endinborough was one among many exploratory feelers of a conquering, autocratic superpower. It was, nonetheless, an enjoyable place to live. The slaves, even, wished not to return to their jungles. And so, when a transient man traveling by foot arrived there and met a captivating girl offering goat cheese at the market, he opted to make Endinborough his stationary home and court her, rather than beseech her to follow him onward and away. It was only an event as devastating as they had years later experienced that could uproot them, ultimately leading them to resettle where they now sat and listened to muffled rain.
-Light your pipe, darling, the fire would like to see an ember of its family from a distance.
He had been observing his fingers pack moist Westminster Blend into the bowl. Leaving them to work blindly, he looked up and caught the latter portion of what had been a wry smile on her face, saw high-speed erosion massage the tensed muscles back to relaxed expression. Her eyes, though, continued to exude amusement.
How does she do it, he wondered, still watching her, how does she weave allusions to her greater agenda using tools available in the here and now?
-Alright, he relented, with some hesitation, alright, I know it's been a long interval since we last saw our son. How shall we approach Endinborough?
Endinborough, a place whose name had its roots in the unintended humor of a talkative scurvy sufferer; a poor, toothless bastard. One of several survivors previously part of a mutinous crew, he had entertained his listeners, the tavern clientele, with harrowing tales of stormy minds floating on stormy waters, conveying the narratives in solemn fits of urgency, preceding every trivial event with utterances a toothed person would pronounce as -and then; sending drunks, laughing, to the floor.
The settlement had grown healthily since those early days. Vessels at port brought merchants and laborers, silks and slaves. Livestock grazed nonchalantly under the sun, and their products were sold or traded at market daily. Clusters of limestone houses were carved out of the hillsides. But there existed a consensus as to the limit of how expansive Endinborough could comfortably become, and its streets, characteristically straight and rigid, jostled irritably here and there as one moved further from the Center Square, finally breaking, defiantly, into full-fledged snaking paths that traced the coastline to other townships.
A)
She looked at him directly, saw into him.
-By water, she said, resolute.
-Would you say the same if it weren't now raining? he asked, wondering if the water of the weather had somehow influenced her by association.
-Yes, she said. I want to feel myself a part of the sea.
-I only wonder, though, if this rain foreshadows a tumultuous time of it.
-Darling, she said, reassuringly, things are not so literary.
B)
-How was it we went last? she asked.
-I don't recall...but a few puffs of this pipe might jog my memory.
He placed the pipe bit between his teeth, struck a match, brought the flame down to the bowl and drew in shallowly several times, brow furrowed. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and exhaled smoke.
-No, he said, but I now have a pleasant flavor in my mouth, and am welcoming a comfortable fatigue.
-It smells delicious, she said.
C)
Endinborough was one among many exploratory feelers of a conquering, autocratic superpower. It was, nonetheless, an enjoyable place to live. The slaves, even, wished not to return to their jungles. And so, when a transient man traveling by foot arrived there and met a captivating girl offering goat cheese at the market, he opted to make Endinborough his stationary home and court her, rather than beseech her to follow him onward and away. It was only an event as devastating as they had years later experienced that could uproot them, ultimately leading them to resettle where they now sat and listened to muffled rain.
Friday, April 16, 2010
We Represent Your Opinion
1. Feedburner reports a surprising number of people subscribe to this blog.
2. I've been reading fiction, which motivates me to write the same.
The result? A voter-dictated variant on choose your own adventure. Each Friday I'll post the letter corresponding to the prior week's winning plot direction, will elaborate the story in that direction, and will offer three new paragraph-sized directions, any one of which the story may take off in. Tonight marking the first entry in this experimental series, I'll start with the three beginnings which follow. You'll notice that each has a title; this, despite the predicament of not knowing even vaguely where the story will ultimately go. I figured that reaching out into the fog with ambiguous titles would be worth a laugh.
A) Corporate Wilderness
Even though a Boy Scout of five years, Peter had never learned how to sharpen his camping knife on the razor's edge of a mountain ridge. His blade, therefore, was always too dull to cut through a tomato for sandwich making. Chewing dryly on a tomato-less sandwich was, to Peter, like sprinting across the Sahara desert with nothing to drink but one's own sweat.
Three minus two morning, as the sun pulled moisture from fresh bear scat and put it back into the atmosphere, a swollen, grey cloud 1,000 miles away in some direction pissed raindrops and kidney stones, which were hail; returning moisture to the ground. This was called a manifestation of Yin and Yang. But Peter wasn't of that culture.
B) The Township That Struck Ashore
The drone of muffled rain accompanied their silent understanding typical of a couple long married. They thought together of this and that, of the weeds which kept the ground from crumbling to pieces, of barnacles having preference for wooden ship hulls over evolution-standard rocks. They continued this way, sitting across from one another, with the fire burning contently, exerting its influence on the cabin's illuminance, temperature, and aural ambiance as ever.
His leather tobacco pouch lay on the table with its opening pulled wide, offering the quantity of its contents to be diminished a pinch.
C) Meanders of a First Person Present Tense
Form won a landslide victory over function with regard to the dimensions of the front counter, I think to myself as I stand in line at the Faux Philanthropist Pie Throw fair booth. With hand in pocket I count coins and conclude I can afford two attempts at hurling lemon meringue into the face of a false donor with enough left over to watch burlesque under the big tent.
Presently, a short, pudgy character with sandwich billboards and fistfuls of Monopoly money approaches, arms raised. He is beaming. He shouts exuberantly to everyone within earshot,
- These rainbows of buying power are absolutely the most current currency on the market!
I gather he hopes to sell the small, colored paper rectangles for the out-of-date currency everyone else has. What a steal!
That's it. Now vote.
2. I've been reading fiction, which motivates me to write the same.
The result? A voter-dictated variant on choose your own adventure. Each Friday I'll post the letter corresponding to the prior week's winning plot direction, will elaborate the story in that direction, and will offer three new paragraph-sized directions, any one of which the story may take off in. Tonight marking the first entry in this experimental series, I'll start with the three beginnings which follow. You'll notice that each has a title; this, despite the predicament of not knowing even vaguely where the story will ultimately go. I figured that reaching out into the fog with ambiguous titles would be worth a laugh.
A) Corporate Wilderness
Even though a Boy Scout of five years, Peter had never learned how to sharpen his camping knife on the razor's edge of a mountain ridge. His blade, therefore, was always too dull to cut through a tomato for sandwich making. Chewing dryly on a tomato-less sandwich was, to Peter, like sprinting across the Sahara desert with nothing to drink but one's own sweat.
Three minus two morning, as the sun pulled moisture from fresh bear scat and put it back into the atmosphere, a swollen, grey cloud 1,000 miles away in some direction pissed raindrops and kidney stones, which were hail; returning moisture to the ground. This was called a manifestation of Yin and Yang. But Peter wasn't of that culture.
B) The Township That Struck Ashore
The drone of muffled rain accompanied their silent understanding typical of a couple long married. They thought together of this and that, of the weeds which kept the ground from crumbling to pieces, of barnacles having preference for wooden ship hulls over evolution-standard rocks. They continued this way, sitting across from one another, with the fire burning contently, exerting its influence on the cabin's illuminance, temperature, and aural ambiance as ever.
His leather tobacco pouch lay on the table with its opening pulled wide, offering the quantity of its contents to be diminished a pinch.
C) Meanders of a First Person Present Tense
Form won a landslide victory over function with regard to the dimensions of the front counter, I think to myself as I stand in line at the Faux Philanthropist Pie Throw fair booth. With hand in pocket I count coins and conclude I can afford two attempts at hurling lemon meringue into the face of a false donor with enough left over to watch burlesque under the big tent.
Presently, a short, pudgy character with sandwich billboards and fistfuls of Monopoly money approaches, arms raised. He is beaming. He shouts exuberantly to everyone within earshot,
- These rainbows of buying power are absolutely the most current currency on the market!
I gather he hopes to sell the small, colored paper rectangles for the out-of-date currency everyone else has. What a steal!
That's it. Now vote.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Whipping Air In Tandem
Two helicopters hovered near each other in the sky this evening. It was more than twice as noteworthy a sight than a single helicopter. It was, therefore, an affirmation of the validity of the sometimes true notion that the Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts (WIGTTSOIP). In this universe of duality, however, it should come as no surprise that a counterbalancing notion exists so that the unoccupied playground seesaw is parallel to the ground and freaking out the children. Specifically, Less Is More (LIM). These two contrasting ideas are not mutually exclusive, there is some overlap.
Whether a system is described more accurately by WIGTTSOIP or LIM, or is described equally by both, depends principally on how the system compares with similar systems previously documented in the library of human experience. If, for example, helicopters were normally seen in pairs, than seeing one alone would make LIM true. And here it should be noted that these contrasting ideas are not strictly opposite, so the seesaw actually slants slightly. Whereas if LIM is true than WIGTTSOIP must necessarily be, if WIGTTSOIP is true, LIM need not be. Graphically,
Incidentally, I'm reading Breakfast of Champions, and Vonnegut's artwork seems to be influencing my own.
Pushing a system to the limit of LIM results in the removal of everything from that system. The result is commonly referred to as a void or vacuum, but it is actually less than that. Words attempting to describe a system that has been pushed to the LIM limit are removed from the vicinity before they can stick, because anything relating to a system, including vocabulary describing it, threatens to become part of the system, and a system at the LIM limit has zero parts. Here is what is funny: there could be an infinite number of zero-part systems all around us or there could be none, and we wouldn't know the difference.
Whether a system is described more accurately by WIGTTSOIP or LIM, or is described equally by both, depends principally on how the system compares with similar systems previously documented in the library of human experience. If, for example, helicopters were normally seen in pairs, than seeing one alone would make LIM true. And here it should be noted that these contrasting ideas are not strictly opposite, so the seesaw actually slants slightly. Whereas if LIM is true than WIGTTSOIP must necessarily be, if WIGTTSOIP is true, LIM need not be. Graphically,
Incidentally, I'm reading Breakfast of Champions, and Vonnegut's artwork seems to be influencing my own.
Pushing a system to the limit of LIM results in the removal of everything from that system. The result is commonly referred to as a void or vacuum, but it is actually less than that. Words attempting to describe a system that has been pushed to the LIM limit are removed from the vicinity before they can stick, because anything relating to a system, including vocabulary describing it, threatens to become part of the system, and a system at the LIM limit has zero parts. Here is what is funny: there could be an infinite number of zero-part systems all around us or there could be none, and we wouldn't know the difference.
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