absolute clarity

Arnold Zwicky zwicky at STANFORD.EDU
Thu Dec 9 22:51:52 UTC 2010


ok, i officially give up.  i write something that's pretty much as nuanced as you could want, and talk about considerateness in writing etc., and i get this in return:

 >There is more than one goal in writing effectively--absolute linguistic clarity is an unambiguous virtue only in legal writing (and then not always attainable).<

i never talked about absolute linguistic clarity (and, indeed, have written many times about why that's a silly goal).  and now the thread has been hijacked onto this topic.

once again i've been understood as taking not the position thatt i was careful to espouse, but some other (much more extreme) position that a reader/commenter was expecting me too take.

i'm sorry, but this is a toxic environment.  and once again i'm deeply sorry that i took part in an exchange here.

arnold

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