… you laugh at this:
String theory does have the remarkable experimental evidence that gravity exists all around us.
The Wikipedia page, "Introduction to M-theory," attributes this joke to Edward Witten. (If the name Edward Witten is familiar to you, all doubt about your geekitude is removed. (This, btw, is a Good Thing.))
The article is a good one. I've slowly become a fan of Wikipedia, but one complaint remains: most of the articles have a writing style so sterile they make the Sahara fecund by comparison. I've speculated in the past that this is likely due to the Wikipedia community's fetish for neutrality.
To that, I now add the speculation that the style is the inevitable result of output from a committee. It could be that the more esoteric topics get covered on Wikipedia, primarily, by one author. I'll have to look at some more of the exotics, to see if there is anything to this hypothesis.
Well, to be fair, gathering data hardly has anything to do with M-theory.
If you got that that last was also a joke, I tip my propeller beanie to you.
4 comments:
I guess I'd better earn the right to call myself a geek, so here goes. You write:
most of the [Wikipedia] articles have a writing style so sterile they make the Sahara fecund by comparison.
Now you've sent me scurrying to the dictionary to see why you chose fecund over the more common (and to my ear more natural-sounding fertile).
The clearest explanation I found online was here:
“... fecundity refers to the potential production, and fertility to actual production, of live offspring.”
In short, fecundity is a probability, fertility a statistical result, of a procreating process.
By this definition, I'd say that neither fertile nor fecund expresses what you (presumably) meant. Wikipedia is quite fecund (its democratic and intellectual structure encouraging an ever growing set of contributors likely to contribute) as well as fertile (said contributors having contributed numerous useful articles). Their common antonym is sterile, which Wikipedia is certainly is not. Perhaps clinical, dessicated, or religiously dispassionate?
Aristotle wrote that “the law is reason devoid of passion”. If it's good enough for him...well, nothing. That would be an fallacious appeal to authority. But I out of sheer coincidence happen to agree with his outlook on the questionable benefit of infusing human emotion into didactic text. I say, more matter with less art. (Sadly, I was not the first to say it!)
Surely this disputation qualifies me for at least a pocket protector, no?
You might be right in taking me to task about fecund, and for that matter, sterile. I think sterile came out of the fingers without thought, to mean airless or lifeless, and by connotation, unappealing. When I got to the second part of the sentence and stopped to think (a rare moment on this blog, I'll stipulate) about an antonym for sterile, fecund came first to mind.
I think I didn't choose fertile because I didn't really mean that the writing on Wikipedia was not amenable to growth. (Even leaving aside topological considerations.)
At root, the cause of my choice might be that I have trouble remembering which is which when contemplating fecund and fetid, even though I know that one of them involves a bad smell. I suppose I somehow keep track of the difference by vaguely remembering that the other, therefore, carries a pleasant smell, one that is rich and earthy.
You know, like good prose.
I completely agree that Wikipedia as a concept, and as implemented, is fecund and fertile, in the senses you gave. I stand by my assessment of the writing style in many of the individual articles, however, and if I had to pick from the three alternatives you proposed, I'd take dessicated. The bonus for this choice is that I could keep the Sahara, and change it to a rain forest by comparison.
There are plenty of sour old coots out there who insist, "You'll replace my Encyclopedia Britannica when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." I am happy not to be one of them, but I do remember many a pleasant hour just taking a volume off the shelf, opening to a random page, and just reading for pleasure. Could be that I was more accepting as a kid, or had fewer choices, but I don't think that was all of it. I think the article on M-theory reminded me of that feeling -- a topic I first looked up only to get a quick definition, but then found interesting enough to read completely.
And as for Aristotle, I'm with Petr Beckmann, who calls him: "… this tireless and tiresome writer …"
So I'm glad you didn't appeal to that authority.
I suppose I agree a bit about resisting the urge to inject human emotion into didactic text, but I strongly reject the implied larger idea that all humanity (humanism?) should be suppressed. Good writing should be vibrant and vivid and vivacious, even if goal is solely to communicate facts.
Editing excessive usage of modifiers and alliteration is perhaps occasionally in order, I'll grant.
P.S. If you've never read the book I linked to above, I think it's a superb example of what I believe about writing, even about technical matters. Just clicking the "page 40" link ought to make this clear.
And on a related note, from the blog that I discovered today, and now cannot escape, you might like this.
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