A Basic Guide for Curious Minds: Review of “Thing Explainer”

[mavhc]

Amused that the first sentence is "Terminology is an occupational hazard of philanthropy", I think he meant "hard words are often used by people who give money away"

[lhl]

As others have mentioned, that's actually not what it means. Here's a version that's closer to the gist of it:

"When you are trying to give away money, the people asking for it can often use special or hard words and ideas that you may not know or that may be confusing."

Sadly "rare," "uncommon," "unclear," and a whole bunch of other words don't make the simplewriter cut (too bad the XKCD tool doesn't automatically try to pull up closet matches from a thesaurus filtered against the word-list).

[sp332]

An occupational hazard is a danger that engaging in a profession opens you up to. Like injuries in football, or getting sued for malpractice as a doctor.

[pmelendez]

I don't think he mean that. I think he meant "People who practice philanthropy often hear hard words in their line of work."

[mc32]

I think it means people for varying reasons see it appropriate to use industry specific terminology when discussing things with non insiders, either out of custom (no code switching) or as a way to project "professionalism" when it's not necessary for communication to occur.

[PhasmaFelis]

> Amused that the first sentence is "Terminology is an occupational hazard of philanthropy", I think he meant "hard words are often used by people who give money away"

Or you could have read literally the next three sentences and learned what he actually meant.

[DanBC]

also "hard words are used by NGOs when you're trying to give money away".

http://reliefweb.int/report/world/words-matter

[mc32]

Gates is spot on and Munro extraordinary. Too often managers feel obliged to use technical language where none is either needed nor natural.

People talking about budgets and fiscal planning making use of hi-tech specific, bio-tech, etc. Anything which passively indicates that they are up to date on cant and argot of totally unrelated fields but serve as signal of being at the edge or on the cusp of all things new and modern and professional.

Examples, using MM for millions, or K for thousands (is that metric K or computing K), or saying "spend" as a noun. Having to sound like one knows and is up to date with all the different industry terminologies must be taxing.

Best of all is when a person is actually familiar with the terminology and senses the forced nature of the out of context use. They can only smile at the stilted use.

[pjc50]

Two great essays on language that is neither needed nor natural:

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...

" I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

    I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

    Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

"

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/goodwriting.h... : targeted at legal writing, but the suggestion to have a point and stick to it is universally applicable.

[semi-extrinsic]

Nature Climate Change recently published [1] a comparison of the language in the IPCC climate change executive summary versus the seminal scientific papers by Einstein and Hawking. Einstein and Hawking's writings are significantly easier to read. (Easy to read doesn't imply easy to understand, but it doesn't hurt either.) [1] http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc...

[gramasaurous]

Reminds me of this[0] talk by Guy Steele where he explicitly defines any word outside of a given set before he can use that term in his speech. Interesting language exercise, definitely worth a watch!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0&feature=youtu.be

[maweki]

Yeah, the book is real fun. Amazon seems to have sent it early and I am not complaining.

It's a lot of text in comparison to the original poster-comic and a lot of stuff seems very repetitive (it's bound to be, right?) since many principles of planes, submarines, rockets are the same (physics). Still a fun read if you don't plow through it in one sitting.

[sanderjd]

Do you think it would be educational for children, or is it mostly an amusing curiosity for adults?

[amelius]

I'm now hoping for a book titled "How to build civilization from scratch".

[gadders]

This book comes close: The Knowledge: How To Rebuild Our World After An Apocalypse

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Knowledge-Rebuild-World-After-Apocal...

[SideburnsOfDoom]

There is "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch" by Lewis Dartnell.

[PhasmaFelis]

Not a book, but here's a T-shirt that runs down the basics: https://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code...

(There's a ZOOM link in the description on the right)

[pjc50]

Depending on how much you mean by "civilization" and "scratch", this isn't the kind of thing that's doable in a lifetime. If it were, international development would be a lot easier.

[dean]

Love the idea. But maybe he should expand his vocabulary a little bit beyond 1000 words. Saying "food holder" instead of "dish", obscures instead of clarifies, which defeats the purpose. Same for "up goer" instead of "rocket". And "funny voice air" instead of "helium". I'm intrigued enough to pick up the book, but I know stuff like that will just be annoying.

[pavel_lishin]

I don't think it's necessarily meant to clarify. I think it's an exercise in constrained writing.

[andrewflnr]

To me the whole joke is just how much you can explain using such a ludicrously limited vocabulary. Clarity is a side effect.

[dockd]

When did "goer" become one of the 1000 most common words in English? Is this really within the self-defined limits?

[gadders]

I would just like to take this opportunity to do my annual joke that Bill Gates should try and monetise his blog with affiliate links or he'll never make any money.

[Jabbles]

What rule allowed him to use the word "goer"?

[visakanv]

Here's the thing– the "rules" of grammar only really exist to facilitate effective communication.

Every so often, a skilled communicator chooses to bend a rule in order to make a point. If the point is well made, it sticks, and people start imitating it.

Next thing you know, the newly-coined word becomes an "actual" word with real currency. (I put "actual" in quotes, because if you think about it, all words are made up. All "rules" are really just general guidelines.)

[zeckalpha]

> (I usually count all forms of a word, like “kick” and “kicked,” together as one word, although there are a few special cases where I don’t.)

http://blog.xkcd.com/2015/09/22/a-thing-explainer-word-check...

[de_Selby]

I'm not sure, but I think we can all agree "US Space Team" is an infinitely better name than NASA!

[milliams]

I guess nounification of verbs is allowed.

[legulere]

The rule that adding an -er to a word you get the agent.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-er#Etymology_1

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

[Beltiras]

I would guess he concerned himself more with stems than surface form.

[smackfu]

Beyond what the other comments said, that was the title of the very first diagram he made like this, and he was probably just trying to pick a punchy title.

[maxerickson]

Doers gonna do.

[rdlecler1]

This would make a great Wikipedia! Score for brevity and using words with high frequency.

[kevinmchugh]

There is the Simple English wikipedia: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

[kbutler]

Although I enjoy the Saturn 5 "Up goer five" description, I doubt that "goer" is in the top 1,000 most common words...

Edit: He's taken the common word list and added different forms as he needed them. Go -> goer and goers, because he wanted to use them. Grow is allowed, but grower and growers are not, because he didn't need them.

[jerf]

Looking at the simplewriter's JS [1] that lists the legal words [2], it appears to have 3634 entries in it. I assume that under the "rules" alternate forms of the top 1000 words are permitted. I'm not sure the "rules" have been explained elsewhere. (Perhaps in the book but that's not out yet.)

"goer" is a legal form of go. I mention this because I actually thought for a moment myself it might not be, but of course Googling it revealed it is extensively used in compound words like "movie-goer". Not sure I've ever seen it in the wild standing on its own, but I'll concede the point. One must grant a certain amount of flexibility here...

(And from the "surprisingly klunky translation" department, what player of Final Fantasy X could forget the Blitzball team name the Luca Goers? [3])

[1]: http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/

[2]: http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/words.js

[3]: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Luca_Goers

[snewman]

I think he's allowing conjugations, e.g. "run", "runs", "running", "ran" count as one word. And he's stretching it to include "goer" as a conjugation of "go".

[evanpw]

There's a whole thread of speculation about the rules on the xkcd forum [1]. It looks like the conclusion is that derived words are allowed, and the base word list comes from here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/Co.... "go" is #37.

[1] http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=98621

[tgb]

They probably classify them by top thousand base words. Otherwise every noun and its plural count, every verb and its conjugations, etc. Though it is kinda cheating to call goer a top word.

[urish]

I wonder at what point does using fewer words become detrimental to understanding.

[sopooneo]

I think it depends entirely on the audience. If a word is appropriate, and your audience is comfortable with it, then not using it is detrimental.

What if some of your audience knows the word? Then it's a judgement call.

[AC__]

I wonder why this book doesn't explain the fractional reserve banking system. Oh wait, never mind, I know why.

[IIAOPSW]

Some of your money that is left in the bank is given to other people so long as they promise to give back even more money. Even though the bank doesn't have all the money that it has taken, so long as most people do not ask for their money at the same time the bank will always have enough for people that want their money back. The bank gives you some extra money for letting them do this. When a lot of people believe the bank can't give their money back, it may cause everyone to try and take their money out. This is called a bank run and can be very bad.

It checks out: http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/