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WORDS_OVER_THE_CRACKS

                                             April 13, 2018

Attention conservation: one of the easiest
things to do in English is express a causual
relationship, but this can lead to expressions
with a false clarity.


I occasionally find myself all-too-aware of
an issue with using words-- specifically, in
my case, English words-- as a medium of
thought.

I want to say something. I think I can draw a
connection between concept A and B, and use            A case in point,
that to clarify a particular question.                 not that I expect
                                                       it to make sense
I start explaining the concepts-- which may            to anyone but me:
actually be pretty familiar, but I need to at
least make it clear what I'm referring to-- and           WORST_ARE_FILLED
in the process, it may occur to me that the
concepts are actually fairly vauge, in spite of           (You need to have
being familiar, e.g. perhaps my concept B is              seen the process I
better handled as two concepts, and I'd be                went through trying
better off breaking it up into a smaller concept          to write it.)
"b" and a concept C--
                                                          And now a few years,
Now, maybe I know *what* I'm talking about,               later, I don't remember
but what *exactly* do I want to say?                      the process at all.
Am I tracing a chain of causality, from
A->b->C?  Could it be that the actual               A guess: it's about a
causality runs in the reverse direction,                  phenomena where
or even a different order?                                internet discussions
                                                          groups and ideological
Perhaps it's better to present them as                    bubbles reinforce each
three points that are associated,                         other, but I was trying
without specifying a chain of causality                   to avoid saying
or any other sort of dependency?                          something simpleminded
                                                          like "the internet
Maybe it's a self-reinforcing knot?                       causes polarization".
A set of conincidental circumstances?

   The reason I'm indulging in this extended and
   excessively general discourse about logical
   possibilities is that a causual chain is by far
   the easiest thing to express in conventional
   English prose:

     "*This* results from THAT because of *that other thing*."

   But once you have something like that, to keep
   from over-reaching and making assertions about
   things you can't possibly know, your next
   impulse may be to hedge, to trick out the
   exposition something like:

     "*This* may very well result from THAT, and it
     could be argued it's because of *that other thing*."

   Any even half-way competent writer can't help but
   fall into such habits-- but they run the risk of
   saying something just because it's easy, rather
   than because it's necessarily correct... and it
   may (certainly in my case) obscure the process of
   thought that led to making the statement.

   With me, it may run something like: I'm interested
   in point A and point B and I have a tenuous sense
   there's some connection between them, so I start
   talking about A and then B and then I start trying
   on different possible connections between them-- I
   might just pick one and present it first, then
   treat it as the cause of the other, if only to keep
   the prose from looking disjointed, to fufill the
   reader's expectations, to provide an immediate
   answer to the question "but what is he saying?"


It could be that it's better to use the loosest
possible bit of verbal wallpaper to cover the
joints, to avoid making premature commitments--

  "Let us now consider point B in the light of point A."

  "Point A and Point B may be related in some fashion."

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