Writes James Marriot, in "Is society growing stupider? The clues are simple and repeated. Shorter sentences and monotonous lyrics form a sign of something bigger" (WaPo)(gift link).
Speaking of shorter sentences, yesterday, I happened to run across this long sentence:
"I say fling but he only worked like a dog in parkinglots, the most fantastic parkinglot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze and stop on a dime at the brickwall, and jump out, snake his way out of close fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour in a narrow space, shift, and back again into a tight spot with a few inches each side and come to a bouncing stop the same moment he’s jamming in the emergency brake; then run clear to the ticket shack like a track star, hand a ticket, leap into a newly arrived car before the owner is hardly out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start the car with the door flapping and roar off to the next available parking spot: working like that without pause eight hours a night, evening rush hours and after theater rush hours, in greasy wino pants with a frayed furlined jacket and beat shoes that flap."
Wrote Jack Kerouac, typing "On the Road: The Original Scroll." I'm fascinated by the readability of very long sentences, but that one struck me (at 40 mph) because I have a long-running debate with Meade about whether good drivers back into parking spaces.
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96 ટિપ્પણીઓ:
I have a long-running debate with Meade about whether good drivers back into parking spaces.
If they are drunk and they do 16 doughnuts first, backwards, and they don't hit anything? They are outstanding drivers.
also, you're going to send yourself to the hospital again reading the impossible
don't hurt your brain we need it
I can read it, I just don't want to diagram it
People are not getting "stupider." What's happening is that our skill sets are changing from one set of skills to another. Because people are interacting with technology more than they are interacting with the real world, it makes people look dumber because they're not developing real world skills anymore. So they're less competent with things like face to face communication, driving and servicing cars, basic household repair and critical thinking. But people have become very good at using smartphones, using the internet, delegating problem solving to machines and video games.
Good drivers back into parking spaces. Women drivers pull in head first.
Its like the brainslug episode
The key is a lot of commas, one semi-colon, and one colon.
If I was Dr. Freud, I would suggest he's avoiding young women because he doesn't like periods.
ba-dum-dum
I asked Grok about the colon, this is what it said.
"A period would have split the performance from its duration. A comma would have left the summary feeling like just one more item in the list. The colon holds the list together and then widens it."
Dedicating problem solving and critical thinking to machines sort of sounds to me like the plot from Uptown Girl, where the daughter of the wealthy rock star trusted all of her money to a guy to manage it, and he absconded with it to Venezuela.
Reading long sentences is a sort of endurance training. If you don't read--and deal with long sentences, there comes a time when you can't handle them. Pop music, Tik Tok, Influencers are like sweet kids cereal. Fruit Loops for the mind. Doesn't give you much endurance for either the written or spoken word.
"I say fling but he only worked like a dog in parkinglots, the most fantastic parkinglot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty..."
I feel like that comma was a little bit of a cheat.
Netflix movies are made for people who are switching back between the movie and their phones. So the dialog keeps them informed of what they might have missed because their attention was elsewhere.
Hello Professor, RE: your parking debate with Meade: Back when I was working overseas for that "criminal organization," USAID (pace Elon Musk), if we wanted to drive any official vehicles we had to first take the Smith Driving School Safe Driver Course, where you always back into a parking space so that you can drive straight out, as that is always easier and safer than backing out.
The simpler movie trend goes with the comment made by Matt Damon to Joe Rogan that movies are now made to be watched by distracted viewers, and they must be constantly reminded of the plot.
“And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay tuned in,'” Damon continued. “And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.”
https://www.boston.com/culture/entertainment/2026/01/21/matt-damon-ben-affleck-joe-rogan/
"Is society growing stupider? The clues are simple and repeated. Shorter sentences and monotonous lyrics form a sign of something bigger"
I don't think he quite remembers the shows and songs of the 50s and 60s. TV is much, much better now than than in many ways, though probably peaked in the late 90s to early 2010s.
Short sentences are also a very strong artistic preference in just about every writing program. As a James Michener fan since early high school, I am sad but very much understand. It's not a sign of lacking intelligence to be to the point and punchier. Some of the dumbest things out there to read our pseudo-intellectual ramblings by those who think complicated sentences are smarter.
Very, very rarely you'll find a long sentence writer who is also very, very smart, but most smart folks who care know how to code shift from complicated to short depending on the goal of the writing/media.
after reading that excerpt i feel like an endangered tree lizard
If Ecclesiastes was being written today the writer would add the line: there's a time to back in and there's a time to pull forward.
Maybe it's anecdotal, but I've found that backer-inners tend to be more self-focused and puller-forwarders tend to be more others focused.
Yes, it's second screen viewing. Plus the "We spent one day [or night] together and it was wonderful, but ..." line has been a staple in the movies for decades. For that matter so are variants of "Fine, I'm off to Bolivia ..." One or the other or both are probably somewhere in TV Tropes.
Kudos though, for resurrecting Lindsay Lohan.
This is an example of hyper femininity. Every woman's request at the beginning of a story is "I want ALL the details". It's the opposite of hyper masculinity as exemplified by the writing of Earnest Hemingway:
The Iceberg Theory (also known as the "theory of omission") is Ernest Hemingway’s core writing philosophy: the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
Hemingway believed that a writer could omit things they deeply understood, and the reader would still inherently feel them. If a writer leaves things out simply because they don't know them, it creates holes in the story; but if they omit them out of deliberate minimalism, it strengthens the narrative.
I'm thinking that Jack Kerouac excerpt is total BS. Another book for the garbage bin.
"Stupider" sounds like a word that might not be a word.
"You're stupider."
I feel dumb just saying that.
Aside from how it sounds, stupider is a really bad counter-insult (I was king of the insults in fourth grade), because you're implicitly agreeing that you are stupid.
It's like you scored a 19 on the test, and your opponent got a 12. You're both fucking retarded, okay? It doesn't help that your retardation is mildly less than your idiotic friend.
"You're stupid."
"You have sex with farm animals."
That's how you win that fight. Mock his sexuality, with something that is a crime, and gross.
Articles that don't make it into the Washington Post...
Is Society Having Sex With Farm Animals?
The dialogue in "Frankenstein, Part II" is 10x better than that!
Am I the only one who read that quote with a Trump voice in my head?
Is society getting stupider? Yes. Why? Because being intelligent is ableist or some bullshit, lol. Actually its because we incentivize laziness. But that's the entirety of the reason shows are written like this now. I was told years ago by someone in the biz this was coming and it's 100% down to two-screening. It's just that simple. Oh...and the publishing industry has been almost entirely ideologically captured so there's no respite there.
"Is Society Growing Stupider?"
The question answers the question. It's not a question at all! The use of the word "stupider" makes clear where we are going.
"Society Is Stupider"
That headline is so stupid, nobody is reading the article. You have to make it a question, so the marginally less-stupid will read the article. "I know I'm stupid but I don't want to be stupider."
The answer is yes. Evidence - has anyone in the last 100 years done anything even close to Shakespeare, Dante, Ovid, Virgil, Tolstoy, George Elliot?
Movies got dumber a lot time ago. Mostly because US films/TV shows are shown overseas. That's where Hollywood gets most of its $$. There's no point in writing great English dialogue when its going to be translated into Indian, Spainish or Chinese.
Its also because US Education has been deliberately dumbed down over the last 40 years. English Teachers decided that instead of elevating their students tastes, they were going to pander to them. Plus the English teachers themselves were more into Erica Jong then Hemmingway.
Lincoln - Douglas debate (round 1)
Biden vs Trump
How does he get out of the car so fast if there is only a few inches between his car and the next one?
"I have a long-running debate with Meade about whether good drivers back into parking spaces."
There are a number of things that people debate even though there's clearly a correct answer. Good drivers back in and toilet paper should be hung over the front.
Assholes and bank robbers back into the parking space. Everyone else pulls in head first because it's more respectful of the people around you
Backer inners correlate a lot with seat leaners on planes.
Pullthrough? Yes.
Backing in? No.
You're taught to write short punchy sentences because most people cant write long sentences without becoming verbose and unclear.
If your'e a great writer, you can write anyway you want. Long, short, medium. Hemingway gave an excuse for people who cant write description or long dialogue to keep their prose "spare".
"Oh look at me, I'm just like Papa Hemingway. Short and Snappy". "Its the iceberg method".
Hemingway learned his craft at the Kansas City Star, which had a famous style sheet that corresponded pretty closely to his writing style. It's hard to understand Hemingway's contribution to style without reading a lot of what came before him, since he has been so widely copied. Sure, his advice would have ruined Moby Dick, so I have to hand that point to the other side.
Back and forth. In and out. Going fast then stopping on a dime. Speeding up and slowing down again. Working like a dog. Getting in and out of tight squeezes. And finally, handing you your ticket.
We get it. We get it.
Yes, I know hemingway changed things. Im pointing out people without his talent took "spare" to mean "Good". Its not. As Heminway said its about writing the "right word" - not the least amount of words.
Paul Kennedy? I'm very tolerant of age differences in romance, but even so I can't see it working out with an old historian like him.
The more Kerouac I encounter, the less I regret not reading more Kerouac.
As for backing in, I used to do it a lot but then I was stuck driving a car with virtually no R for a few years and became a puller-through.
...you may notice that the characters are explaining what is going on...
Matt Damon has said in interviews that filmmakers are being told to do this by the studios because Millennial and Gen Z viewers typically split their attention between the film and their phones.
Oh yeah. People are definitely getting stupider, and more ignorant.
Not a fan of folks backing into spots. The back side of a car has lots of information that is helpful to other drivers in parking lots, especially the reverse lights letting me know when a car might move. Those brake lights are super handy to see too! When a car has been backed into a spot, I have no idea if that car will move soon.
Drive a full-size pickup truck and you will learn to back in (and to do it quickly using only the side mirrors, no girly backup cameras for you), because most parking lots are small enough to make backing a truck out of a spot tricky at best.
Supreme Court justices tend to write on long, convoluted sentences. Not at all sure this is a good thing...
So as I understand it, Maddie was doing a guy the day before she married another guy, and being indignant that there was criticism. Sounds pretty modern,
Was Maddie in a Cornell Fraternity?
Narr said, “Oh yeah. People are definitely getting stupider, and more ignorant..”
And arrogant. A bad combination.
Random insertions of punctuation marks can help you build long sentences with which to impress the readers; thankfully he didn't use a dash - which would have been cheating.
“Writes James Marriot, in "Is society growing stupider?”
Of course it is, and the fact that it took Marriot this long to notice is further evidence.
If you’re the kind of jerk who backs into parking spaces, why not learn how to do it right the first time? People are tired of waiting for your back-and-forthing to try to get it right, and just when we think you’ve finally settled in and it’s safe to go by, you come roaring out again to adjust it by that last quarter-inch. But I guess I answered my own question.
“Drive a full-size pickup truck and you will learn to back in (and to do it quickly using only the side mirrors, no girly backup cameras for you), because most parking lots are small enough to make backing a truck out of a spot tricky at best.”
That’s because most parking lots are designed for passenger vehicles, not farm implements.
If you're looking for dyspeptic reactionary polemics you've come to the right place.
Or buy a Kerouac book.
"That’s because most parking lots are designed for passenger vehicles, not farm implements."
My full-size truck is actually smaller than the Ford Excursion i was given when a rental company didn't have the sedan that we asked for.
I think the self driving Tesla does not back in? What do you say to that he-man car parkers?
I think the self driving Tesla does not back in?
It varies. Backing in is its preferred mode, which you need to override when you want trunk access. It will nose in for diagonal parking.
"Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy."
Take it from someone from Massachusetts: NEVER marry a Kennedy!
I back in, almost always quickly and efficiently, utilizing both mirrors and backup camera. Pulling through is preferable, but if someone's right on my @ss in a parking lot I'll just pull in. Because backing into a space is easier than backing out into 'traffic', mostly because all of the large vehicles make it so that you can't see anything until you're already halfway out.
Music is getting simpler, that's been demonstrated a few times with analysis of key changes, chord structures, and lyric simplicity. Add in autotuning and pitch correction and there's no real soul to vocals either. Plus, there are very few recent guitar masters.
I started reading a supposedly mainstream science fiction novel recently and I gave up 1/4 of the way in because it read like a young adult work. It was simple and everything was explained in detail.
"Society Is Stupider"
Stupider requires some sort of comparison. ...the "er" at the end of the word seems like it should ...like the Les McCann and Eddie Harris song. Tryin' to make it real, compared to what?
Stupider than....? Yesterday? than people in France? than a flatworm?
Whether you should pull in or back in depends on the vehicle and the parking lot - how the spaces are laid out and the type/volume of foot and vehicle traffic.
Backing into parking spaces is safer than backing out, but good drivers are by definition capable of performing either maneuver without incident. It’s bad and mediocre drivers who benefit most from back-in parking.
My favorite long sentence is both use and mention:
Let not the reader lose his temper with me if my prose has not the felicity to please him. You maintain my ideas are at least singular. What you say, respectable man, is the truth, but a half-truth. And what an abundant source of errors and misapprehensions every half-truth is! Flights of starlings have a way of flying which is theirs alone and seems as governed by uniform and regular tactics as a disciplined regiment would be, obeying a single leader's voice with precision. The starlings obey the voice of instinct, and their instinct leads them to bunch into the centre of the squad, while the speed of their flight bears them constantly beyond it; so that this multitude of birds thus united by a common tendency towards the same magnetic point, unceasingly coming and going, circulating and crisscrossing in all directions, forms a sort of highly agitated whirlpool whose whole mass, without following a fixed course seems to have a general wheeling movement round itself resulting from the particular circulatory motions appropriate to each of its parts, and whose centre, perpetually tending to expand but continually compressed, pushed back by the contrary stress of the surrounding lines bearing upon it, is constantly denser than any of these lines, which are themselves the denser the nearer they are to the centre. Despite this strange way of swirling, the starlings cleave through the ambient air at no less rare a speed and each second make precious, appreciable headway towards the end of their hardships and the goal of their pilgrimage.
Lautreamont
Re the Kerouac excerpt: That's writing, not typing.
Mary Beth knows the score. All good drivers should be capable of easily backing into a parking spot, but the decision to do so is context-dependent.
Cormac McCarthy can go long >
"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."
from Blood Meridian
Dust Bunny Queen said...
Stupider than....? Yesterday? than people in France? than a flatworm?
Yes, no, yes.
When I park, I'm backing up in a parking lot once and going forward in a parking lot once. I back into parking spaces because I am not then being chased by bad guys, and there is a very small but still higher than zero chance I will be chased by bad guys when I leave.
Too many truck drivers who back up to park think it's okay for their trailer hitch to be in the space in the next row.
My old Yaris had useless mirrors that make backing up impossible. You simply cannot see without rolling down the windows, readjusting each mirror, taking several iterations to do it, so that you finally can see the lines. Better to back out. It's the first car I've had that trouble with.
"As Heminway said its about writing the "right word" - not the least amount of words."
He kept some things to himself about his style too, like what was it in those paintings in Paris museums that he studied to improve his own writing? He said it was a "professional secret."
Watch a Braves game at home. It's like they are afraid that the fans attention will wander if every break in the action, no matter how tiny, isn't filled with some kind of obnoxious music. You know, so that it is difficult to actually think about the game you are watching.
The people who Washington Post reporters and editors hang out with are growing evermore stupid and insipid, that's well established. What's remarkable is it took an AI-generated movie script to get WaPo to notice what has been glaringly obvious since Obama first emerged from thoroughly deserved obscurity.
Backing into parking spaces seems wiser, but somehow at work it is always the arrogant people who do it.
“I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.'"
There is a Democrat congressional candidate who had his tree lizard photographed, but nit in Bolivia.
Sounds liks a line from madame webb
For an interesting, informative, and descriptive long sentence I recommend Tom Wolfe's description of trainee pilots landing the first time on an aircraft carrier (pages 20-21 in my very old version of The Right Stuff).
Driving a car at speed in traffic over roads highways and freeways has little to do with parking a car where the stakes are minimal. It's like evaluating a ballplayer based on how well he parks his ass on the pine. More hypomasculine dribble from a guys guy.
That second comma makes the whole thing one big run-on sentence, now called a comma splice. Then there’s the questionable use of the colon at the end. A colon is a signal that what comes next is pointed to or illustrated by what came before it. This one doesn’t. But the imagery is masterly.
"My old Yaris had useless mirrors that make backing up impossible."
Try backing up a Lamborghini Countach. It's easier to hire someone to manually push the thing backwards in neutral while you sit there like a hood ornament steering in the direction your hireling points.
Backing up is now super-easy on many cars because they have cameras. If you have an older car without those, then adequate mirrors are required.
Backing up would be easier if they'd arrange the parking spaces so they lineup, but they never do.
My wife took the youngsters to the fire department open house years ago. A firefighter told her it is a good idea to back in when arriving at home, because while it takes a bit longer you are seldom in a hurry to get into your house but you might be in a hurry to get out.
I had an uncle who could back up a tractor-trailer truck like he was backing up a VW beatle. It was quite amazing . I suppose practice makes perfect.
RC reminds me of Regan from the Exorcist.
Sometimes, like at 6:54, the real person breaks past the Demon and you almost want to like the bastard. Almost.
"Try backing up a Lamborghini Countach. It's easier to hire someone to manually push the thing backwards in neutral while you sit there like a hood ornament steering in the direction your hireling points."
Now there's a first world problem.
This is getting to be a chicken & egg thing. Writers are stupider as are readers. That was true forty years ago as well after 30 years of TV.
That said, Dickens & Tolstoy were too long to read by the radio age.
Competing with other forms of entertainment sharpens the mind. I don’t see why anyone would make a movie geared to adults that has to explain the plot like an episode of Scooby Doo. Just don’t make the movie. I think the younger writers don’t think well. They grew up on Woke & Text Messaging.
Jesus wept.
My wife often plays audio books when we're on a road trip, and I was pretty amazed at the shortness of one she played on a recent trip. Most before have been at least 10 hours long, maybe more, but this one was finished before we completed a five hour drive with time to spare. I wasn't sure if it was intended to be a short story in an anthology or a complete book.
re Pete @3:41pm… “Blood Meridian” is an excellent read! Hard to put down and stayed me for quite a while after I finished it.
Sheesh… stayed with me
I have it on good authority that both Hemmingway and Kerouac backed their cars in, providing they were sober. Hemmingway always backed his fishing boat in, at the slip, too. Erica Jong and parking spots, SMH. She's always trying to straddle the damn thing.
[start virtual italics]Ann Althouse said...
I think the self driving Tesla does not back in? What do you say to that he-man car parkers?
10/7/26, 2:17 PM[end virtual italics]
Althouse:
I have been doing a lot of research, including speaking directly with Tesla representatives, because I'm planning on leasing (most likely) or buying a Tesla quite soon.
My understanding is that the Tesla DOES back in. In fact, I am told, its preference in FSD is to back in when you're parking in a perpendicular space in a parking lot.
My understanding, again, is that you can pick your preference between Parking Lot, Street, or Driveway. And, when FSD is engaged and you're headed home, you can select your preference for end-of-trip behavior in terms of parking.
Earlier versions of Tesla did, apparently, have issues with back-in parking, but my understanding, again from research and speaking directly with Tesla representatives, these have been resolved.
FWIW.
By the way, Tesla is very, very proactive in its marketing if you have expressed interest. After talking the first time to a Tesla representative, not only did that particular person call me back a number of times, but other representatives did as well. All were trying to motivate me to lock in a purchase or lease right away. The number of calls and emails has reduced once I made it clear that I was going to wait a month or so to make my decision, but I'm ancipating they will start up again soon!
Did you know that Tesla offers insurance options in some states (Florida, where I live, is one of them)? It is substantially, substantially cheaper than other options I researched. And it drops even lower depending on your FSB usage. The more you use FSB as a percentage, the cheaper the insurance. Tesla measures your FSB usage and percentage each month and adjust that premium accordingly.
Just an interesting data point that I was surprised to discover.
ALSO, isn't it Shouting Thomas who drives a Tesla here? Now, he may have an older vehicle, and I don't know how that works re: back-in parking. The same? Better? Worse? Maybe if he's around he can provide his direct, personal experience.
My info was based on a new purchase of an up-to-date vehicle and FSB.
Backing in prioritizes leaving over arriving. Backup cameras make backing in easier and backing out safer.
'We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day, filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.'
That line probably plays better on-screen than it does on the page, but it's still awful.
In the Bible it says, "For as man is the head of the household, he should be able to back his trailer where God's Grace has given space unto him. And it is appointed unto the wife to guide the man in his backings with all proper signals of hand and word. And should the man lay sick of bed or taken early into the abode of Heaven, it falls upon the wife to assume the backing of the trailer and unto the children to guide her thusly."
LOL. FSD, not FSB. I’m not throwing my lot in with Russia’s secret security force. But I got a good laugh at myself for that typo—twice over.
I think the people who do the writing in this culture are starting to secretly mock it. "Fine. I'm off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard." The dialog comes across to me as part of a comedy sketch - people being pretentious in the 21st century.
"Fine. I'm off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard."
"Well, Paul and I will spend our honeymoon in a treehouse watching migrating monarch butterflies."
"Well, my next job is photographing habitat damage done by people requiring exotic honeymoons."
All three then return to their tiny closet spaces somewhere in LA.
chuck said...
I'm thinking that Jack Kerouac excerpt is total BS. Another book for the garbage bin.
I made it about 2/3 of the way through before I chucked. Book is total crap in my opinion. Doesn’t deserve the hype.
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