On being prolix
I like that word, “prolix.”
I first learned it in high school, probably on some vocabulary list meant to prepare me for the SATs.
Or maybe it was in studying The Scarlet Letter during my sophomore year. That book had more words that I’d never heard of before than any book I’ve ever read before or since (I particularly recall, not without fondness, “physiognomy” and “enervate”).
Sure enough, through the magic of the internet and Google, there she blows (see also this):
This, in fact””a desire to put myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of the most prolix among the tales that make up my volume,””this, and no other, is my true reason for assuming a personal relation with the public…
And this:
Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand…
As well as this:
If he possess an unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable.
Bingo.
But I digress—I often digress.
I wrote a very long post today. That was not my original intention. I thought I’d just dash off a quick piece on the Pope’s visit, a slight sequel to the post I wrote yesterday on the subject.
But that’s not what happened. Today’s post grew—and grew and grew—till at 3278 words I finally had to call it quits.
What happened? Well, I started researching a few things, and this point seemed very relevant to that point which seemed awfully relevant to both points, and it all started to fit together as a whole. The post segued from the Pope to the life of Dorothy Day, and try as I might I couldn’t make it shorter or more organized, and so I left it in all its prolix (“extended to great, unnecessary, or tedious length; long and wordy”) wonder.
You might try to reassure me by saying “Oh neo, it wasn’t too long, it was interesting.” And maybe you’d even be sincere (it was certainly interesting to me anyway). But, as Mark Twain (or any number of other famous people) has written, if I’d had more time, I’d have made it shorter.
Blogging is an interesting thing. The need to comment on a daily basis on the happenings of the day is at odds with complexity and completeness, and certainly at odds with proper editing and excising of the superfluous or redundant. All I can say is that I do my best, and sometimes it’s overwhelming. But something keeps driving me forward.
The past year or two has been especially—shall we say—subject-rich. Every day there are literally dozens (or more) things happening that seem pressing to write about, and a blogger must pick and choose. And there are about 400 unpublished drafts that go back many years and could be trotted out on a slow day. Usually I just write about what interests me; every now and then I write about what I think will interest readers even if I’m not that keen on it (those are often shorter). Sometimes I start a topic, as I did today, thinking the piece will be short, on a subject that doesn’t seem that compelling, and I end up discovering information that fascinates me.
That may be the best of all, like a treasure hunt where you find an unexpected and perhaps-precious jewel. These stones don’t always sparkle—sometimes they are dark, depressing, and disturbing—but the quest for truth is the thing. Truth is elusive and slippery, and sometimes hidden, but we have to keep digging, don’t we?
No comment.
If it’s any consolation, I visit your site every day, and almost always read it. You’re a talented blogger, and one of the most thoughtful and careful of all.
neo,
You do pen three and sometimes four blog posts every day except for Sunday. (I’m very sure you already know that.)
Shunting this present “prolix” post aside, I’d reckon that your marathon post of 3278 words is easily the equivalent (quantitative, at least, maybe not a moral equivalent) of three 1100 word posts. But since today did after all turn out to be a prolific day, it’s better viewed, sez me, as the equivalent of four 800 word posts.
See? Not so egregious. [ smile ]
I’ll simply echo Scott (4:54 pm): “You’re a talented blogger, and one of the most thoughtful and careful of all.” So many of us here appreciate so much what you offer us.
M J R
Chunks of prolix prose with extended embedded chunks of looooooooooooong quotations from yet other chunks of prolix prose are the reason that the highly condensed, but accurate, internet acronym
TL;DR
was made.
You do amaze, Neo. I admit, that since I’ve gone back to work (16 years ago!), I prefer brief to extended. Back in the day, lengthy was my preference. But you have a way of expressing complicated things lucidly. That is a gift.
I read that post, and didn’t even notice (i.e., how long it was).
…but I’ve been a fan for years too (and though my commenting has died off – too busy …and too disgusted with politics …and that technical issue with being oddly blocked for a long period totally put me off my oats …and commenting is a habit after all – my reading certainly hasn’t).
Your write ’em, I’ll certainly read ’em.
Heck, neo, you ain’t got nothing on artfldgr when it comes to some of that prolix stuff. Blog on, neoneocon is the only blog I read everyday when in reach of wifi. Btw, we are recently back in Iowa from a 7 day trip in Zion NP with our daughter, son in law, and 2 grandchildren to celebrate another year of her being cancer free. Life is good, despite the madness of humanity at large.
https://ymarsakar.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/theodore-roosevelt-concepts-of-the-early-20th-century-united-states/
Some money quotes there.
The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he will see to it that others receive liberty which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country in the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so he does not wrong his neighbor. Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and without reference to which side happens at the most to be the persecutor and which the persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to a nation, of substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgement awarded them according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to envy and hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy. The overbearing brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious and hateful malice directed against wealth or power, are really at root merely different manifestations of the same quality, merely two sides of the same shield. The man who, if born to wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less fortunate brethren is at heart the same as the greedy and violent demagogue who excites those who have not property to plunder those who have. The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily in the line that separates class from class, occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth, instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or whether he be poor, without regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied in a republic. There have been many republics in the past, both in what we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to divide along the wealth that separates wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether the republic fell under the rule of and oligarchy or the rule of a mob. In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position.
In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or antireligious, democratic or antidemocratic, it itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations.
Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or antireligious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest. The very last thing an intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man because that public man says that he will get the private citizen something to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess.
It will indeed be the very “last thing” they do as free humans.
People back then wrote their own speeches and sometimes they were rather long. It’s better than the 10 second sound bites crafted by GOP and Democrat DC bureaucrat operatives and vampire dynasties though.
Oh neo, it wasn’t too long, it was interesting!
Seriously interesting.
P.S.You’re one of the top bloggers on the net. Prolix is not a word for you. Informative, interesting, well-rounded, balanced, yes, but not prolix.
All comments should be shorter than neo’s posts.
Keep on truckin’ sister.
No one can measure your beneficial effect, but it must be considerable.
Hope you derive great pleasure from the enterprise, you deserve it.
I write op-eds for fun — and to try to save a few liberals from the ill effects of their elected officials. The papers I’ve written for are pretty specific: “900 words,” or more recently, “600 words.”
Managing to vent my spleen in no more than 600 words has been a real trial, but I find I can do it if I keep returning to an essay and cutting more. It is not fun work, but it is rewarding to see that it can be done in such a way that people understand what I am trying to say.
So I appreciate brevity, but I prefer seeing someone cover a topic completely and bring in collateral ideas and threads to cause me to say “ah hah!” every once in a while.
You do that very well, Neo, and I thank you for the richness of your essays and the variety of your topics.
Blathering, I know, but please do not give up.
You yourself primarily but an amazing number of folks who are gathered with you.
> “I particularly recall, not without fondness, ‘physiognomy’ and ‘enervate'”
Meh. Moby-Dick has unenervated and physiognomical, not to mention one grand and glorious sentence of 176 words.
Ishmael:
Can I call you that?
We had to read Moby Dick sophomore year of high school, too.
Of the two, The Scarlet Letter definitely was harder to read, harder to understand, and had a more challenging vocabulary. I loved Moby Dick and did not care for The Scarlet Letter.
And The Scarlet Letter had so much promise, too. After all, it was supposed to be about adultery.
It’s easy to compress English paragraphs, all one has to do is to use more complicated wording so that the contextual meaning overlap in a less dense space-time format.
Then the next complaint they have is that they find it hard to read (low vocabulary issues).
Wait, you read what they assigned you in highschool?
But that’s not what happened. Today’s post grew–and grew and grew–till at 3278 words I finally had to call it quits.
What happened? Well, I started researching a few things, and this point seemed very relevant to that point which seemed awfully relevant to both points, and it all started to fit together as a whole
and now you know why my posts are too long…
if this was how to tie a new fly for fishing, easy peasy short.. but you ask questions that take novels to answer… then want them short, which does them disservices… even more so when the common knowlege on something is completely wrong and you cant just say this is wrong, this is right, and not prove it to those that will just discount out of hand what was just pointed out.
so what happens is the people that know give up as its too hard to fight the ingorance at some point and frustration goes.
fighting ignorance is like fighting a fart with a sword…
everything stinks and nothing you do will matter
Arfldgr:
It’s not a question of now I know.
I’ve written many times on this blog about my problem condensing things, and how I tend to write long. I’ve also written about how hard it is to decide what to include when everything seems important.
However, I do condense, edit, and pick and choose. I give links rather than quoting enormous reams of material, at least the vast majority of the time.
I have no problem realizing that it’s hard for you to condense. Nevertheless (and particularly when people are commenting, which is a different thing from writing posts) it is necessary. I acknowledge it as a necessity in my posts, as well.
You should have seen what I left out of that post 🙂 .
Assistant Village Idiot:
Yes.
I had a very rigorous high school; that is, the classes (AP, etc.) that I was in were very rigorous, and it was a NYC high school during the 60s. We were not only required to read that stuff, we were tested critically on it. We had vocabulary tests. We were forced to answer hard questions in class. We had to write many long papers on stuff you couldn’t look up; questions of morality or meaning, questions that didn’t have strict answers.
Of course, nowadays it would be easy to look that stuff up online. At least, I assume it would. Back then, nothing doing.
“You should have seen what I left out of that post 🙂 .”
Now you have something to post on a slow day!
Seriously, I much prefer you prolix to anyone else’s brevity.
Your blog is one of my “must reads” every day.
and now you know why my posts are too long…
That doesn’t explain why you’re too lazy to capitalize your anything, Art.
The world isn’t going to change merely because you are unable to change yourself. That’s a kind of mutually annihilating clause there.
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