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JStewart comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong
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Edit: Grouchymusicologist has already covered silly grammar-nazism, passives, and Strunk and White, complete with the Languagelog links I was looking for.
I think this one should be deleted. The first sentence of it is wrong as written, but the idea behind it is expressed clearly and sufficiently in #26 anyway. People do not talk in grammatical, complete sentences.
As for the second half, do you really look up etymologies as you write? I have only the vaguest sense of the origins of the vast majority of words in English, and this despite taking 5 years of French in school. This advice doesn't look like it was actually meant to be followed in any practical sense, and I would need some convincing that it's even a good idea.
This advice seems similarly quite arbitrary and unmotivated.
You don't need to look up etymology to have a feeling for the sources of words. In general, the Germanic words are shorter, seem less academic, and have a lower proportion of vowels. Of course, it's possible to overdo it.
This gave me so many jollies. Someone call up Seamus Heaney and have him put it into Anglo-Saxon verse.
In the workstead watching, we made a worldken;
A beholding of bits, their bulk and bindings...
This is beautiful:
(You could almost call it "Einstein for Newton's era".)
Interesting: I knew German used (the equivalent) of "coalstuff" for carbon, but I didn't know they used "chokestuff" ("stickstoff") for nitrogen. Per the German wikipedia, that's due to its use in "choking out" flames.
And "sourstuff" for oxygen. Unfortunately they don't use "sunstuff" for helium though.
We also use "waterstuff" for hydrogen.
"Speed" is Germanic, no need to replace this one.
Perhaps it was meant as a replacement of "velocity".
("Weight" is used for "mass", making me suspect that something such as "heft" might be used for "weight", i.e. "force".)
That usenet post is incredibly entertaining, thank you for linking it.
Excuse me if I'm telling people things they already know, but it's a quote of a short article which is also available in books. Poul Anderson was one of the major golden age sf writers (both fantasy and science fiction), and quite possibly worth looking up-- a lot of his work has been reprinted by NESFA and Baen.
I'm not sure what the best Anderson for rationalists would be, maybe "The Three-Cornered Wheel". I'm very fond of his A Midsummer Tempest-- alternate history set in a universe where everything Shakespeare wrote was literally true. Check out Three Hearts and Three Lions if you want to see what golden age pacing looks like-- it's a short novel, a lot happens in it, and I think a contemporary writer would have puffed it up into six long novels.
Vernor Vinge and GRR Martin's writing remind me of Anderson-- there's something about the style of description and the way heroism is constructed.