Thread: What did he say???

What did he say???

Do you find it easy to understand highly complex writing such as legal documents?

If so, do others say you’re sometimes a real klutz when it comes to understanding truly simple sentences in a novel?

What significance can you attach to this duality?

NB Please write on one side of the paper only.

I can't follow challenging writing at all. From science to law to philosophy, anything that is complex - not in style (as I do have a solid grasp of the English language), but in substance - I just can't understand it. I think it's too late to start studying science and law doesn't really interest me, but I do try to read anything of philosophy I can get my hands on, from the Platonic dialogues to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Plato is okay - the translated script is right next to the original, and it's not so much complex as it is slightly ridiculous - but modern philosophy just makes my brain fart and feel very ashamed of itself. I don't know if that's because of the modern writers' tendency to overcomplicate everything we write, but if it is, then it can fool me, because I don't know what to make of it.

Of course if I devote ten minutes to every page I can make it through such a book and understand it, but it's very tiring for me. I'd like to be able to say "oh, yes, I absolutely understand anything I read, no matter how challenging!", but some books are just difficult for me, and if I do get them, I'm not going to get it the way some other people just naturally do. But hey, joke's on them - I read the whole of Kalevala in one go and that's the kind of writing I am really into!

I don't fulfill the criteria for the "if so", but it's very interesting, so I'll give you my two cents! What you say reminds me of the stereotype of a chess grandmaster calculating 20 moves ahead through a maze of a position and missing the mate in two. I don't think that really applies all that often, though. If someone has gotten used to reading books of the complexity of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I doubt he's going to get stuck on Harry Potter. I don't know how much truth there actually is to it, but it smells an awful lot like a standard compensation stunt.

In cases where this "duality" does ​exist and it's not just a case of what-people-say, then I feel compelled to say... "Oh, how wondrous it is, the way the human brain works!" -- but I seriously doubt there's much truth into it.

Olly said it about the Limerick thread but, in truth, it applies to the entire site – you never know what someone will come up with next. ^^^

Legal documents are designed to be read by lawyer, are deliberately ambiguous in order that lawyers can earn humungous amounts arguing the exact meaning of a 3 line sentence with no punctuation and lots of hereins and heretofores - Remember, the eel that is Bill Clinton is a lawyer - Or does that deoend on what the meaning of is is...

When it comes to the written word, men have most trouble reading instruction manuals - Sandi Toksvig said "If you want to hide indiscrete letters or emails from a man, file them in a folder labelled 'Instructions'"

I have trouble with being instructed, my mind wanders or believes that every other line has been removed from the written process - It is my belief that it should be compulsory for instruction manuals to always be written by people who can't do it, this would mean that they would see the problem as we see it, and instruct us accordingly.

I'm secure enough in my manhood to both read instructions and ask for directions. The quality of the former is all over the map, though. These days, a lot of them are poorly translated, which doesn't help. This bit I read in a Chinese furniture assembly manual wasn't very ambiguous, but it was pretty funny -- "Place pin in hole. Take hammer and strike it some blows." Here's another from a warning sticker on a Chinese made pellet gun -- "Do not aim at creature." Ha ha.

I was hoping for a discussion of one’s ability to understand complexity while at the same time being unable to grasp the meaning of simple sentences, not some gobbledygook about Chinese laundry lists.

Like most people, I have trouble understanding complex writing, and not much trouble understanding simple sentences. So I don't have a dog in the fight. Of course, like a lot folks around here, I felt compelled to comment on the preceding post -- even if it had nothing to do with the OP. Sorry.

So, it's serious you want is it my antipodean friend...

Perhaps because the complexities you read are fact based whereas the sentences you read are capable of interpretation (or indeed, misinterpretation). There are no opinions as the whether E does indeed equal MC² only calculations based on that contention; but when it comes to literature or poetry, we all invest our own meanings in our reading of any particular sentence, often based on our own experience of life as we live it. Take Sonnet 116* for instance, most people I know read it as a paean to fidelity, my tutor at Birkbeck insisted that it meant the exact opposite, but then, I have been married for 40 years and she divorced for several - Is this why we see the poem from different perspectives? Ease of understanding is person dependent, based on education, experience and need - Need? Yes, need. If we need to understand a particular catagory of document we will educate ourselves as to their meaning and purpose, I have no need to understand calculus even when I was doing "A" Level maths, but geometry and trigonometry were usable, and continued to be throughout my working life, so I understood and could read the latter. If I were a lawyer I would be able to understand the language and only need to understand the context. When faced with a work of fiction we have to understand both the manner of deliver and the context at the same time, simultaneous interpretive events. I would suggest that when reading an author with whom you are familiar, this is less of a problem.




*SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Are you thinking of Autism? I have Aspergers, and I can often understand complex logic, maths etc, but often have difficulty understanding phrases and expressions. I have always been much better at reading non fiction than fiction.

Deleting because after rereading my post because it was pretty much irrelevant to the intention to the thread.

Originally Posted by themooresho

Deleting because after rereading my post because it was pretty much irrelevant to the intention to the thread.

Irrelevant? That doesn't stop anyone. My post was irrelevant -- plus it was based on something irrelevant from another post. That's two whole levels away from relevant.

Originally Posted by JosephB

Irrelevant? That doesn't stop anyone. My post was irrelevant -- plus it was based on something irrelevant from another post. That's two whole levels away from relevant.

Well, it was a bit of a soapbox, so I thought better of it. I re-posted it in the Debate section because I really needed to get it off my chest, but it has yet to be approved by the moderators.

Originally Posted by Robdemanc

Are you thinking of Autism? I have Aspergers, and I can often understand complex logic, maths etc, but often have difficulty understanding phrases and expressions. I have always been much better at reading non fiction than fiction.

Funny you should say that...