The oft-maligned Chinese Language Simplification <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Character_Simplification_Scheme> of the Cultural Revolution seemed on it's face to be an attempt to prune back out-of-control language bushiness?  When seen as an attempt at social control it seems unconscionable but to curb verbosity and /circumloquacity/, well motivated?

Trump's verbal tic of fixating on a word (e.g. "Gro-cer-ies" or "Ta-r-iff") seems to be his nod to the under-literate who feel the same way when THEY learn a new word?

I'm guiltier than most for (tyring to) add context to the context to the context of words I don't fully trust to be exactly what I meant:

   "/I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I
   think what you heard was not what I meant" ?/

 glen wrote:

[⛧] It also results in a bit of a verbosity explosion, where every polysemic word or phrase needs more phrases to disambiguate it, each of those phrases then needing more phrases, etc.

I do believe it is possible to recognize when someone is trying to communicate vs when someone is trying to obfuscate?   I think our discussions here of late about LLMs touches on this.  Can I tell if an LLM is "trying" to help me research/understand/think-about something" or is it just trying to "tell me what I want to hear"?   There are probably terms-of-art (a term of art in itself?) for this distinction/spectrum?

While my abstraction of LLMs as a manifold of sub-manifolds with linear narratives tracing various sub-manifolds might be misbegotten, it is where my head goes often.   The question (for me) is whether there are families of sub-manifold (said family a manifold in it's own right?) which can be labeled as "righteous" or "good faith" vs "duplicitous" or "bad faith".... but to Glen's point, nothing is context free?   A narrative arc on a story-world manifold within a story-multiverse (e.g. DC vs Marvel, vs ???) represents nested context?

When I worked with lawyers I felt I could tell the difference in the legalese I occasionally read if they were trying to be clear or obfuscating...  but not sure I could write an algorithm to detect which?

FWIW in the spirit of linguistic hair splitting, one of my favorite lines from a fantasy short-story was "the glint of the spark of the light of the fire in the eye of the dragon".   Though I'm not sure quite why... maybe just a verbosity fetish?


mumble,

 - Steve

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