"Complicate" = "elucidate the complexity of"

[Jonathan Lighter]

People who talk regularly and approvingly about "complicating" texts (and
even "complicating our understanding," IIRC) are not noted for a penchant
toward "light humor."

If humor ain't complicated, it ain't nothin'.

Keith Douglas (1920-1944) wrote a famous poem during WWII beginning,
"Simplify me when I'm dead."

He cries out for complication.

JL


 On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 1:08 AM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Complicate" = "elucidate the complexity of"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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