"Complicate" = "elucidate the complexity of"

[Victor Steinbok]

You, guys, must have missed the research notice from a couple of months
ago that claimed that conservatives tend to see things in much more
simple terms than liberals. To put it simply, they avoid complications.
So, my guess is, this was attempt at light humor at the expense of
"modern republicans" who tend to have a very simplistic, one-dimensional
view of the "Founding Fathers" (and of the French Revolution). As such,
the reading would have been literal--making things more complicated.

     VS-)

On 3/22/2011 10:26 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> Einstein was sooooooo twentieth century.
>
> Besides which, he was a scientist - not a cultural theorist.
>
> JL
>
> On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 10:22 PM, Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:
>
>> At 10:03 PM -0400 3/22/11, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>> > From an announcement of a forthcoming Newberry Library
>>> Eighteenth-Century Seminar presentation by PROFESSOR DENA GOODMAN:
>>>
>>> Professor Goodman seeks to complicate the picture of
>>> nineteenth-century reactionary aristocrats and modern republicans by
>>> bringing an eighteenth-century perspective to bear on French
>>> revolutionary and post-revolutionary culture and society.
>>>
>>> I think I'll skip this -- historical life is complicated enough as it is.
>>>
>>> Joel
>> Isn't this what used to be called (in the good old days)
>> "problematizing" an issue rather than complicating it?  Maybe, since
>> "complicate" has another, somewhat less complicated, use, the term of
>> art should be "complexitize".  Or "compleximatize".
>>
>> Perhaps Professor Goodman follows the old adage, not quite due to
>> Einstein, dictating that everything should be as complex as it can
>> be, but not more so.
>>
>> LH

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