It's not obvious that attention is being diverted to obscuring information. Maybe "partner" is the lower-effort term. It is for me: "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" have weird connotations and baggage that make me want to pause before using them and wonder if I'm really being accurate.
It's not obvious that attention is being diverted to obscuring information.
It makes it harder for me to build a mental image of the situation that he's describing. If it's harder than I will put less attention on the situation.
Here it's a subtle choice. But it points to a pattern. A common general piece of advice on telling stories which draw listeners attention is to provide a lot of adjectives to make it more easy for the audience to picture what you are describing.
The kind that most people don't put to practice when they hear it. Instead of describ...
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