NancyLebovitz comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong

49 Post author: lukeprog 26 October 2011 06:52PM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 25 October 2011 12:57:23PM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 October 2011 04:02:21PM 5 points [-]

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...

Comment author: komponisto 25 October 2011 02:40:53PM 3 points [-]

This is beautiful:

Nor are stuff and work unakin. Rather, they are groundwise the same, and one can be shifted into the other. The kinship between them is that work is like unto weight manifolded by the fourside of the haste of light.

(You could almost call it "Einstein for Newton's era".)

Comment author: SilasBarta 25 October 2011 04:37:15PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: prase 25 October 2011 04:50:48PM 0 points [-]

And "sourstuff" for oxygen. Unfortunately they don't use "sunstuff" for helium though.

Comment author: Tripitaka 25 October 2011 04:52:22PM 1 point [-]

We also use "waterstuff" for hydrogen.

Comment author: prase 25 October 2011 03:56:19PM 0 points [-]

haste of light

"Speed" is Germanic, no need to replace this one.

Comment author: komponisto 25 October 2011 03:58:53PM *  1 point [-]

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".)

Comment author: DSimon 25 October 2011 02:08:17PM *  0 points [-]

That usenet post is incredibly entertaining, thank you for linking it.

The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 25 October 2011 04:49:38PM *  2 points [-]

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.

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