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Brevity. Is the soul of wit, really? Brevity? The soul of wit? For reals? C'mon
Erios
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O rly
:roll:
Though if someone does nothing else, brevity is the crutch of trivialities.
Terribly amusing that people keep using that one, considering that Shakespeare himself didn't much skimp on the extraneous words. Say, for example:
It's just about possible that 'brevity is the soul of wit' is an ironic statement, because Polonius takes 10 lines to stammer through what actually he says in 5 words. It's also just about possible that if Shakespeare had actually intended what he said to be the hard'n'fast rule you seem to think, he would have written Waiting For Godot and not Hamlet.
Roll away. Some posters are prone to unwarranted verbosity. Expressing your thoughts efficiently is a virtue in this format.
What, your analysis of the phrases original appearance in Shakespeare?
It's a bit beside the point of whether brevity is a virtue in an online discussion forum.
Which brings me back to my point - people who make long posts are generally engaged in superfluous tangents or just not concise with what they are trying to say.
I only quoted the emoticon because it was the only thing relevant to my response. That cuts down on the size of the quote trees as discussion goes on you see.
Dude's got a point, folks.
...except that as with most literary references, it looks a bit stupid when the original doesn't have quite same intent you are assuming. Especially when it looks like you are just using the soundbite without having read (or understood) the context it came from. Super triple especially when you are using it to complain about having to read things thoroughly.
Uh huh. Well, this has been quite an illuminating and pedantic personal attack. Perhaps the next time someone says Waste not Want not we can call you for background on the life of Ben Franklin.
In any case:
1: Brevity is good.
2. No one has really responded to my point that age does have something to do with taste, illustrated by the Dharma Bums example.
I was pointing out that your (though actually, I said 'people', since everyone does it) use of that quote misrepresents the original intent. This being a thread about Shakespeare, and if you read what I posted a page or two ago I might have done so because it was somewhat pertinent. I was also pointing out that fetishising brevity is just as stupid as being perpetually verbose. I'm sorry if you took some or all of that as a personal attack, and I'm sorry if you think knowledge or attention to detail are pedantic, but I can't really do much about either - also, I don't even know who you are?
Really, get over yourself. It is possible for people to use something you say as an example without it being an assassination attempt.
It probably started coming off as an attack when you went with the double and triple stupid statement.
Look, I sympathize because people misusing "The winter of our discontent" drives me up the wall, but really this is kind of a tangent of a tangent.
True, but a lot of the times brevity leads to unclarity.
Agreed, sometimes ideas are way too complicated to be expressed in a sentence or two. I can't think of anyone that wouldn't be the laughingstock of any place that turned in an important propsal for any topic, academic or professional that was made up of a minimal number of words(Shakespeare included).
The whole point of that speech is irony. Polonius just spends 900 years contradicting himself and giving increasingly meaningless advice to Laertes, and then ends his rambling by saying 'brevity is the soul of wit'.
Unless you're trying to be ironic with 'just about possible'.
Like rain on your wedding day.
PS every time I hear the word 'parse' used as a verb in place of 'understand' or 'comprehend' or 'intellectually process', it just makes me want to hit sometihng. I don't even know why.
Appropriate styles for appropriate mediums. This is not an important proposal for anything.
Basically this is a conversation, not a paper.
Well, brevity may be the soul of wit-but I'm not certain in this topic the intent is to be witty.
I could not disagree more.
Or were you proving your point?
Minimalism is shit.
Do you have any idea how boring everything would be to read?
It would be double plus un-good.
Do you know how hard it is to write a long paper while trying to write things as succinctly as possible?
Do you know how much subtlety and depth you lose when you try to write things as succinctly as possible?
Never use 10 words when 5 will do.
I said "It's always good style to express things as succinctly as possible.". Note the emphasis. This isn't to say that all philosophy papers should be 10 words or less, 2 syllables or shorter each. If it takes 10,000 words to precisely express what you mean to, then use 10,000 words. But don't use 15,000 to express the same idea.
Now, you said "Albeit not necessary practical in certain fields/varieties of writing.". I cannot think of a single field in which the opposite of the above is true.
In a Purple Prose competition. BING!
edit: I posted this simultaneous with Elki. I've said all I can on the subject anyway. And for the record I agree, for the most part, with Senjetsu. I do not think the implication of "unnecessarily verbose" was a fair characterization of my earlier posts, though.
Are you honestly this dense? If you're losing anything, you aren't expressing the same thing more succinctly; you're expressing something else.
suc·cinct
1. expressed in few words; concise; terse.
2. characterized by conciseness or verbal brevity.
Nothing mentioned about keeping depth or subtlety. But, back on topic. Weeee.
Thanks for pointing out my mistype on necessarily.
I prefer circumlocution and excessive description to minimalism by far. :P
The two extremes aren't appealing whatsoever-there is a middle ground between pretentious overwriting and terse, concise phrases.
When the situation calls for elaboration - as it often does in debate threads - you should do so.
I didn't mention verbs either; gee, I guess I was saying that you should also lose the verbs for the sake of brevity!
Or perhaps all of these things are the very things which should be expressed as succinctly as possible? Perhaps when making things any more succinct causes you to lose any part of your message you have gone too far, beyond that "as possible" bit I mentioned earlier?
hi5
-Blaise Pascal
Making things shorter without sacrificing content is a tricky and exceptionally valuable skill to master. Except that it becomes worthless when talking to people who lack the fluency needed to understand the short-version. People, especially kids today, seem to expect everything to be spelled out for them in the most basic structures and using the most basic vocabularity. Specificity in word-choice is lost on the generation that doesn't know what "specificity" means.
Besides, Mark Twain was both brief and witty. To wit:
"Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody."
What a good quote.
Really? Gee. And here I thought that the best witticisms had lengths on par with a doctoral thesis.
Well if it's such a goddamn obvious point then why are we even arguing about it, since clearly it's so obvious that everyone just simply must agree on it and instead of actually debating or anything in here we're all just jerking each other off.
You can agree. You can disagree. Do not use your retarded idea of sarcasm to criticize me for stating a point that you agree with to such an extent that you are irrationally angered.
Sometimes great witticisms can be quite long compared to simple one liner gag jokes.
In short: your mom.