I’m sick and tired of unnecessary abstractions. Why do we say that “man is greedy”, when we’re talking about ourselves? “The media reports” in plain language means “I saw something about this in the morning paper.” On TV panels, talking heads keep claiming that social media is all about hate speech, but they’re obsessed with the comment sections of tabloids. And all too often in a newspaper story the “many” who demand something are the writer and two of his friends.<\/p>\n
Administrative language is often a jungle of abstract processes and measures, and it\u2019s difficult to figure out which real world issues they really refer to. A dental clinic is “oral health care”, courses are “skills development”, and a playschool is “early childhood education service”. With this approach, everything melts and blends: authors, children, patients, athletes, artists, choirs, students and seniors will dissolve into multi-service centers. Planners can easily cut, reduce, transfer and “rightsize” on paper, because the decisions don’t directly affect people, only “service delivery.”<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s keep our language close to the real world. The Language Police razor* cuts away unnecessary abstraction and generalization.<\/p>\n
* As with Occam’s more famous blade, the main principle of the razor is that we should always choose the simplest representation available.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m sick and tired of unnecessary abstractions. Why do we say that “man is greedy”, when we’re talking about ourselves? “The media reports” in plain language means “I saw something about this in the morning paper.” On TV panels, talking heads keep claiming that social media is all about hate speech, but they’re obsessed with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14,15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-718","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-english-en","7":"category-wordoftheweek-en","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1251,"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions\/1251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}