[juris]

The title gives more credit to the argument than the article :) someone also mentioned this, and I think we are kidding?

I’ve had debate coaches in both high school and college complain about my “academic utterances” and it has taken awhile to unlearn them. I think I have won— partially because I no longer make it a habit to sound cool on the internet (or in the meatspace). Partially also because I’m older now, so I don’t care. But looking back, I think that ego is the primary motivator for the prose, if I’m being honest.

The secondary motivator being our education: the complete bag-of-words LLM approach to writing and reading we all took to get A’s on our exams… you are forced to read one metric crap ton of 1700s prose, and if you catch the damn cadence and harness it to sound good, you are rewarded by your English teacher. This conditioning sticks around for awhile.

Some of you speak to the tertiary excuse: that we’re trying to convey something deeper to our audience than words alone can convey. Like you dive deep into meter, think about enunciation and the effects of sub vocalization (where hard consonants and cadence matters), or making coherent imagery out of wall of text wordslop.

I think it’s fine, but maybe you should think about whether you are alienating your listener the deeper you go.

I was hotly jealous of Kant again, was just now reading Critique of Reason on me old jailbroken Kindle. I had grandiose ideas for inflicting that prose on people everywhere I go, so that maybe we could fix stupidity “up top”. But maybe that imagery was for his time and we are mistaken to try to emulate it.

Ironically I was re reading kant because I was afraid I am getting mentally flabby with age. This article happily reminds me that the adipose was strong when I was younger though.