Comment by echelon_musk
1 month ago
Are you an English speaking American? Because being a native English speaker and actually being English, or from a former English colony will differ.
I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking.
This kind flowery language is typical (or symptomatic depending on diagnosis) of how English people actually used to speak and write.
The average English vocabulary has dwindled noticeably in my life.
> I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking.
Various registers representing a huge proportion of US English we see and hear day-to-day are terrible. American “Business English” is notably bad, and is marked by this sort of fake-fancy language. The dialect our cops use is perhaps even worse, but at least most of us don’t have to read or hear it as much as the business variety.
Most writing is intended to communicate. Business writing is intended to create an impression.
> Most writing is intended to communicate.
If you mean 'communicate information', no. Communication, including written, is for emotion, social expression, and other things before information.
Even information requires those other things to be retained well.
> The dialect our cops use is perhaps even worse, but at least most of us don’t have to read or hear it as much as the business variety.
Ugh, and journalists often slip into cop dialect in their articles. It's disgustingly propagandic.
Notice that cops never kill or shoot someone, even in situations where they're blatantly in the wrong. It's always, "service weapon was discharged" or "subject was fired upon." Make sure to throw a couple "proceeded to's" in there for good measure.
2005 Hurricane Katrina, news described a black man carrying bread through floodwater as "looting a grocery store" and white people carrying bread through floodwater as "finding bread and soda from a local grocery store".
Image: https://media.snopes.com/2016/09/looting.jpg
Snopes: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hurricane-katrina-looters/
someone starts using business english and my bullshit meter pegs.
my significant other loves the "real life mormon housewives" and "lovingly blind" reality shows, and when they use business english (a weird thing to do when talking about relationships, but hey, what do I know I'm an engineer) it's a tell that they're lying.
I recently had a terrible experience with a developer who only communicates this way, and it's terrible.
Every single sentence is way too complicated, vague, deferring, or hand-wavy, and I can't know if they're being honest or just bullshitting me.
Half of the terms are incorrectly or are exaggerations when I probe: "Coupled" means "the code is confusing to me". "Monolith" means "the architecture is complicated to me". "Refactoring" means "adjusting the style". "We need a new abstraction" means "we need a new idea".
The team already had some issues with misunderstandings because of the above.
It's someone so eager to be part of the "big boys club" and trying to push their way to the top.
It's also infuriating.
I think it has much more to do with porting the vernacular vs. formal register distinction common in other languages into english than how english people actually used to speak and write.
As a US student, clarity and simplicity was always emphasized when I was being taught to write.
Never thought of Strunk & White as being distinctly American, but I guess you have a point.
Maybe so, but it was my time at a British university in the late-nineties that taught me how to write simply and precisely. Maybe I'd been infected (as described in sibling comments) with American "Business English"?
It's most likely that they are. As farfetched as this sounds, the CIA and the Iowa Writers' Workshop influenced American writing a great deal, encouraging writing to be taught in the "American" / Hemingway style.
> “the American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop” as a “content farm” first designed to optimize for “the spread of anti-Communist propaganda through highbrow literature.” Its algorithm: “More Hemingway, less Dos Passos.”
https://www.openculture.com/2018/12/cia-helped-shaped-americ...
Dos Passos and Hemingway were both American.
The CIA's problem with Dos Passos was that the was left-wing.