At 11:28 AM 12/07/2000 +0100, you wrote:
>
><mailto:ccogan@telepath.com>Chris Cogan scribbled: people can judge for
>*themselves* whether my claims are likely true (or at least severely
>veridical).
>
>Silk here: People with common sense & few inferiority complexes can only
>"judge" your motives for continually employing "gobbledygook"! "severly
>veridical" indeed!
>I've got a virus scanner naturally used to do some "virus cleansing", too
>bad I haven't got one to do some gobbledygook cleansing! I'm not being
>facetious, I'm dead serious!
Chris
Not to mention really wrongheaded; the phrase "severely veridical" replaces
a paragraph of explanatory material with *two* words! Get a grip. If you
are not qualified to read adult English, stick solely with Jones and
Bertvan. Doing so will also have the advantage of saving you from having to
*think*.
>While in college I had to wade through not only professors "jargon" but
>the overinflated egos of those who wrote many textbooks riddled with this
>gobbledygook! Here the students were struggling to learn something new &
>not only did we have to deal with the normal complexities of learning a
>new subject but also with the egos of those allegedly teaching us
>employing "double negatives & gobbledygook" to shore up their own pathetic
>egos & to (as they considered) demonstrate their superior intelligence! It
>was not at all unlike someone placing something (in this case information)
>in a maze & daring you to find it. Making it unduly difficult! There can
>be no excuse for this sadistic behavior! It was only after I had mastered
>a subject that I began to realize how completely superfulous & sadistic &
>counterproductive these gobbledygook tactics were. If I had a dollar for
>every time someone I was tutoring said to me "Silk the way you put it is
>real clear, why didn't the professor explain it this way?" I would roll my
>eyes & invariably say "because he was not there for you, you were there
>for him!" mr. cogan may indeed have some valuable contribution to make to
>this list however I'd hate to be a student in his class! A word to the
>wise is sufficient! This may boil some blood & so it should. Most students
>are not the "brighest" crayons in the box & they should never be subjected
>to this nonsense! All efforts should be made to employ methods that
>honestly address "learning" in its most efficacious form! chao/silk
Let me put it clearly: You don't belong here. You belong in a Sunday School
class, where everything is simplified and all the qualifications and
complexities are left out and the student is left with an overall idea of
what was said that is "clear" and simple, but *false* and damaging, and a
superstitious way of dealing with the world and ideas.
Is that clear and simple enough?
Oops. No, it's not. I used the word "superstitious," and "complexities,"
and "qualifications." And, though I put "and" between the main parts, the
last sentence *is* long.
Take a look at your own paragraph above. Do you think that *that* paragraph
(really about six paragraphs all jumbled together like salad) is so clear?
It boils down to:
I have psychological problems with the way Chris writes
and I'm upset and am going to scream in anger.
So, why didn't you just *say* so and be done with it?
None of this is not to say that I can't possibly learn to write more
clearly or more simply. I hope I can. More simply. In shorter sentences.
Simple explanations. Clear ones. Each bit laid out by itself. Then the next
bit. Subject, predicate. In a paragraph. Subject. Then, maybe, predicate.
Veridical: Of an idea, proposition, or theory: that it corresponds to
reality in important way(s) even if it is in fact *not* actually true
(example: Newtonian physics).
In common usage, it just means something like truthful or veracious, or
reliable. However, when I learned the term, I learned it pretty much as I
defined it above, and it stuck with me because I thought the distinction
between ideas (etc.) that are "like" the truth and ideas that *are* true
was an important one. I still do, which is why I add that phrase in my
sentence.
Ptolemy's theory, for example, is false, but it is, to a significant
extent, *veridical,* because it makes the same predictions (again, to a
significant extent) as does modern theory concerning the perceived motion
of the planets.
In general, it appears that most, if not all, purely scientific theories
can only be *known* to be veridical, unless they are qualified in very
special ways (which they virtually *never* are).
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