Reading ranting grunting.

Anton Sherwood (dasher@netcom.com)
Tue, 23 Sep 1997 20:49:01 -0700 (PDT)


the Inventor of the Lorrey Drive wrote
: SF is the only place where I can find new ideas that someone isn't
: trying to bury under umpty million syllables of latin-ish scientificese.
: Why do highly skilled and specialized scientists insist on writing about
: their discoveries in nomenclature and acronyms that only someone also in
: their own highly specialized field would understand?

Short answer:
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction
is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." (Mark Twain)

Long answer:
"The untrained man reads a paper on natural science and thinks:
`Now why couldn't he explain this in simple language.' He can't
seem to realize that what he tried to read was the simplest
possible language - for that subject matter. In fact, a great
deal of natural philosophy is simply a process of linguistic
simplification - an effort to invent languages in which half
a page of equations can express an idea which could not be stated
in less than a thousand pages of so-called `simple' language."
(Thon Taddeo in _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ by Walter Miller, 1959)