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Re:Smooth Talk by coldtea on Thursday November 02, 2017 @01:04PM (#15612186)
>So many sentences in this article are nearly meaningless, and impossible to parse. The reason is that the author and his idols reject meaning itself, so when they attempt to produce advice on conveying meaning, they instead produce nonsense.

The sentence you quote is, at worst, clumsy. There are few, or no, signs in the post itself that the author rejects meaning or anything or the sort. He might be a hardcore Derrida scholar for all I know (-- but that's hardly apparent in the post and the point he tries to make are quite clear.

Here's a "translation":

"While writing is supposed to intimately represent who we are"

This needs to translation.

"this software highlights the perpetual inadequacy of translation"

...this software is an example of how when we translate something, we lose some part of the meaning of the original.

"intervening with standardization as optimization"

...the software meddles with our writing process, presenting us with the most standardized options (regarding word choice, standard rules for "better writing" etc) as if they represent the optimal way to write something.

Re:Smooth Talk by microcolonel on Thursday November 02, 2017 @01:15PM (#15612280)
> There are few, or no, signs in the post itself that the author rejects meaning or anything or the sort.

You're correct that the article itself doesn't spell it out clearly. My spidey senses just started tingling when I was uncertain I had understood the singular intended meaning of the sentences. I checked out the author bio and it confirmed my inkling: that postmodernism and/or posthumanism has something to do with why this article is such a pain to read.

I am a human, and all of the beings which read and understand English, as intended, are humans. Posthumanism is an affront to the conveyance of meaning, no matter how drab or lame you think your essay is after you run it through Grammarly.

It is true that, given only the rules and conventions of a language, no singular meaning can be read from an utterance. It is, thus, tempting to say that no utterance has any singular meaning. I contend that the human condition lends sufficient context to read a singular (or close enough) meaning from a well-formed utterance.

Re:Smooth Talk by coldtea on Thursday November 02, 2017 @04:41PM (#15614102)
>It is true that, given only the rules and conventions of a language, no singular meaning can be read from an utterance. It is, thus, tempting to say that no utterance has any singular meaning. I contend that the human condition lends sufficient context to read a singular (or close enough) meaning from a well-formed utterance.

That though is not all that post-modernism says, but rather a a reduced straw-man version.

Even if they alluded (or openly) stated that, they did it for particular, quite rational, reasons, with they explained with much more nuance and drew rather rich conclusions from.

In the end, like with the dadaists/surrealists, people might have laughed at them, but half of what we consume culturally today, from ads and graphic design to mainstream tv and comics, owes them huge debts.

Speaking of the original post-modernists of course. Not that the American academics that followed french post-modernism much understood this nuance.