Observations around recent writing(s)

A few random observations around my recent writing and writings:

1. It is easy for some formulation, some word, some approach, whatnot, to gain something almost formulaic and to become detached from its original purpose, original meaning, or whatever might apply.

   As I have noted in the past, “e.g.” has in my eyes come to be closer to a mark of punctuation than to an abbreviation—to the point that I have considered formalizing this by introducing some own sign to fill the same role in slightly less space. I have abstained for the simple reason that such a sign would require constant explanation to new readers, which makes it highly suboptimal for the blog (and similar) format(s). (While it might work reasonably well in a book, provided that it is the only, or just one a very few, special signs.) However, a somewhat similar complication applies even to “e.g.”, it self: While any English reader should understand this abbreviation (and shame on him, not me, if he does not), the mental switch that has taken place with me, from abbreviation to quasi-punctuation, cannot reasonably be expected. Where I might then find a repeated use of “e.g.” in one paragraph or even one sentence as unremarkable as the repeated use of commata, someone else might view it as an absurd repetitiveness of formulation—just like I react negatively to Wikipedia articles that contain “also” in every other sentence.* I have increasingly tried to be more varied by substituting a “for instance” here, a “for example” there, and some other formulation in between, but this often feels wasteful and it can remove any claim of an “e.g.” closely followed by an “e.g.” being legitimate, as it now clearly is not punctuation.

   *Notably, articles on actors tend to be filled to the brim with claims like “He also starred in X. After that, he also starred in Y. In 1999, he also starred in Z.”. The best that can be hoped for is that formulations using “also” are alternated with formulations using “then”.

   (Yes, I can write entirely without “e.g.” and its equivalents—as in the above paragraph, where I feared that the use would decrease readability unduly. I can also get by without “however”, “on the one hand”, “firstly”, “whatnot”, and whatnot; and I do realize that they can make a text, in some sense, heavier. However, when I do, the end result is that I feel a loss of precision in bringing my intentions over and/or must use uglier or less flexible formulations.)

   Another example is “excursion”: From an etymological point of view,* the word can be given a very free interpretation; however, I suspect that my own use pushes the border. The reason is similar, in that the word “excursion” came to mean “some lines following the main body of a text, never mind form, length, and content” to me. Here, too, I occasionally try to be more precise, e.g. by marking a disclaimer with “disclaimer” instead of “excursion”, but I am not very consistent.

   *The Latin root would amount to a “running out”, with English meanings including various trips and side-trips (as well as metaphorical such in texts), and with German/Swedish near-calques (“Ausflucht”/“utflykt”) that have been known to include picnics.

2. Beginning in December (2022; currently, January 2023), I have increasingly tried a policy of “write the text at once and add no new backlog entries”. This has worked reasonably well, but not perfectly. A particular problem is what to do when I am writing one text and am met with the idea for another. The repeated misjudgment that “I can temporarily suspend the writing of longer text A to get shorter text B out of the way”, has usually resulted in text B being as long as or longer than text A, and comes with the risk that I have an idea for a text C while writing text B… I have certainly not had enough time to get rid of older backlog entries and my backlog has still grown somewhat. (But this must be seen in the context of a lower text count for January, to date, than in the previous months.)
3. A partial reason for this lower text count is my recent illness. The illness was quite brief, but it resulted in a prolonged sleep deficit. Too often, in the days since, I have simply lacked the energy and the alertness of mind to write (read, or doing anything else more constructive) resp. write a text of a greater length/importance/effort/whatnot.

   Other reasons include that “fed up” has often won in a contest between a wish to finish more texts and my being a bit fed up with writing.

4. Over time, I have found my own style of writing growing more complex, unless I consciously counter it to deliberately strive for simpler words and a simpler sentence structure. I have not quite descended to the level of, say, Oswald Spengler, whom I have explicitly criticized in the past ([1]), but I do find myself drifting in a similar direction. While I consider this unfortunate, it raises the question whether such convoluted prose is a personal failing and/or an attempt to “sound smart”, which I have long assumed, or whether it might be an unfortunate side-effect of too much writing and/or too much reading of intellectual or “intellectual” authors.

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Revisiting verbosity based on Wesnoth

Since writing a text dealing with verbosity (among other things), I have dabbled with Wesnoth*, which well illustrates the problems with undue verbosity, lack of tempo, and similar:

*See an excursion for some information and a few notes on terminology beneficial for the non-player’s understanding of this text.

1. Most campaigns contain an undue amount of narration and dialogue*.

   *Which is fixed in advance. Only very rarely can the player influence the development of the dialogue, and then only within a small set of fix choices.

   Now, a good story can make a campaign more enjoyable*; however, the point of the game is to play the game—if I want to read an extensive story, I can just grab a book.

   *Especially, through adding aspects with no correspondence in the “pure” game, e.g. character background or a romantic sub-theme.

   Worse: Most of the resulting text is pointless. It adds no value to the story or the overall enjoyment; is repetitive; states what should be a given; or is otherwise a waste of time. (That the text is very often poor by criteria relating to prose, effectiveness, story-telling, …, does not help—but that is an unrelated topic.)

   For instance, very many scenarios start with multiple enemy leaders saying variations of “I will crush you, puny humans!” or “Victory shall be ours!”—which reminds me of German sports writers, who do not tire of headings like “X will den Sieg!” (“X wants to win!”). What had they expected that made that news-worthy?!?

   Another complete idiocy is “war council” scenarios where various characters make mostly pointless statements, sometimes leading up to half-a-dozen characters, one after the other, saying “Agreed!” (or something to that effect)—where a simple “(All agree.)” would have done just as well, with a fraction of the player’s time wasted. Usually, the entire council could have been compressed into just a few lines of dialogue or replaced by a simple narrative message.

   The bulk, however, is lost on unduly long narration, mostly amounting to filler.

   To boot, if a campaign is played more than once, the value of the (textual parts of the) story are diminished further (while the non-story parts remain similarly interesting to the first time). What might be acceptable the first time around, need not be so the second, third, or fourth time.

   Sometimes, it is so bad that I skip entire sequences of story (which is, fortunately, possible as a lesser evil)—but am then (a) left with no benefit at all from the story, (b) often lack context,* and (c) can miss various hints to optimal game play given in the text**.

   *E.g. in that I do not know why I suddenly have an ally or why I am suddenly trying to defeat a band of orcs, instead of those undead that had hitherto been the main enemy.

   **E.g. that a wooded area contains hidden enemies or that some aspect of the standard game-mechanisms has been temporarily altered.

   Most campaigns would be better by cutting the text in half; some would be better by cutting it to a tenth. (Note that I do not say that the story should be cut—only the text.) Generally, it is important to understand that different types of work require different types of writing—a game is not a novel, a play, or even a comic.

2. The previous item is made the worse by limitations in the way that the game displays text: A longer piece of narration is displayed with no more than a few lines at a time (the next few lines following after user confirmation) and in an annoying manner, where each line is slowly blended in, one after the other. (Fortunately, this blend-in can be skipped by pressing the space key; however, this risks skipping too far, and a setting to skip the blend-in as a matter of course is not present.) Similarly, dialogue, even single words, is always displayed individually for each character speaking. Both imply that the user (even when wanting to read) has to hit the space key every few seconds; both have negative effects on strategies like getting a cup of coffee between scenarios to read the narration and dialogue at the beginning of the next scenario in a fully relaxed state.

   A particular annoyance with dialogue is that any utterance causes the view of the “board” to be focused on the speaking character, which leads to an additional delay and implies that the focus will usually end up at a different portion of the board than before the dialogue.*

   *Since the original focus is not restored. This is OK for pre-scenario dialogue, but problematic with in-game dialogue: Consider making a move to attack, having that attack interrupted by a triggered dialogue, and then having to scroll back to attempt the attack again… This leads to yet another unnecessary delay.

3. The problems are not limited to text. For instance, some war-council scenarios contain sequences of half-a-dozen characters moving across the board, saying something, and then moving back across the board. These movements bring no value, appear to be unskippable, and take an excruciating* amount of time, during which the player can do nothing within the game. Still, some campaign makers have deliberately taken the effort to add these “value subtracted” moves…

   *I play with the animation speed increased by a factor of four (and have all unnecessary animations turned off). Even so, such sequences are horribly slow. With default settings, the best bet would be to grab a book until the movements are over—which really shows how redundant they are. (Another interface quirk is that the next faster setting is a factor of eight, which would be beneficial here, but might make other portions of the game move too fast.)

4. A related scenario-error within regular game play is to involve too many units at the same time. For instance, there are a some battle scenarios (e.g. in “Legend of the Invincibles”) with more than a hundred AI-controlled units on the board at the same time (almost all of which are moved every single round)—and where it takes several rounds for the player and the AI-controlled enemy to even make contact.* The ensuing (mostly) unimportant movements, can go on for minutes… Even after contact is established, it takes quite a while before the majority of the units are actually involved in fighting—and that often occurs because sufficiently many of units have finally been killed off…

   *A better way to handle so large battles is to give the opponents less “starting gold” and more “income” or otherwise delay the “recruitment” (without reducing the total number of units eventually involved). A partial improvement is to reduce distances between opponents, but this could lead to a too fast defeat of some of the enemies or increase the influence of luck.

   In such cases, I have even made my own moves, done something completely different while waiting for the computer to make its moves, and then just checked whether the outcome was sufficiently satisfactory* when it was my turn again. Of course, this work-around is often foiled by some random dialogue in the middle of the battle, e.g. when an important enemy unit died. I then have to click through the dialogue, restart the battle, and go back to my “something completely different” for another few minutes…

   *With an eye on two things: Firstly, the loss of some specific units can lose the game outright. Secondly, if too large losses of other units occur, an eventual victory would by Pyrrhic. In both cases, it is time to start the scenario over with a better approach.

In the defense of these campaigns, they are contributed by various users and, therefore, rarely written by professionals. Then again, the more “professional” a campaign appears in other regards, the more text there tends to be (both in general and with regard to “pointless” text).

Excursion on Wesnoth, background information, and terminology:
The games is officially called “Battle of Wesnoth”. It is a turn-based strategy game, mostly played against an AI, which I played very often some years back—before frustration with too great an influence of luck, a poor user interface, and many idiocies in campaigns eventually drove me away. (The issues discussed here relate to literal or metaphorical verbosity—the overall list would be much longer.)

A “campaign” is a series of linked scenarios, roughly equivalent to the overall adventure or war. A “scenario”, in turn, is roughly a sub-adventure or a single battle. A “unit” corresponds to a piece in chess. I have otherwised tried to be low on “technical terms”, in favor of what those unexperienced with computer games and/or Wesnoth might find understandable.

Note that some descriptions above have been simplified compared to actual play. (For instance, even the large battles scenarios discussed above will typically start with only a handful of units, and see armies rapidly expand through “recruitment”.)

Those interested can download it for free from the official Wesnoth website, which also provides more detailed knowledge than given here.

Disclaimer: I played using the latest version available in the standard Debian repositories (1.12), which is not the latest version released. However, this should only affect general game-features, not individual campaigns. Further, the user interface has never improved* much in the past, leaving me pessimistic concerning later versions.

*Add more unnecessary or even annoying animations—yes. Tweak the looks of various units—yes. Improve actual usability—no.

Excursion on reading speed:
I suspect that some of the above is worse for those who read or process information faster, e.g. in that the “coffee strategy” will work better for a slower reader, who will hit the space key less frequently and have more time to relax during an individual portion of text. (On the other hand, a slower reader will, obviously, need longer to reach game play, and might grow more frustrated with the length of the delay.)

Excursion on “The Elements of Style”:
“Omit needless words” is likely the most famous claim in that book. Examples like Wesnoth and Der Untergang des Abendlandes really drive home the point. Notably, the main problem with both is the sheer quantity of needless words (and needless movements, etc.). The latter also shines a different light on this recommendation, in as far as “The Elements of Style” was written in a different era, when texts like Spengler’s were far more common than today, and the advice correspondingly more beneficial: Looking at typical writing back then, it was likely the single most important advice to give; today, it is “merely” good advice. For instance, my recent criticism of Stephen King’s novels (as too thick for their own good) is not rooted in individual formulations being unduly long*, but in problems on a higher level, e.g. individual scenes that could be cut out or shortened without loss.

*His sentences are reasonably compact—certainly, more so than my own…

Prose and “Der Untergang des Abendlandes”

I find myself unexpectedly returning to prose and style of writing—after having intended to deepen my understanding of history and societal development: Yesterday, I started to read Oswald Spengler’s “Der Untergang des Abendlandes”, which, going by reputation, should have contained a fair amount of material of interest to me. After about a hundred pages, most of which consisted of a foreword, I gave up in frustration—the man simply could not write. (And the overall work is two volumes of more than six hundred pages each.)

Ideas, definitions, and arguments are drawn out ad eternam. What could have been stated in a single ordinary* sentence covers an entire paragraph—or more. The total contents of these hundred-or-so pages could be compressed to ten. (If the rest of the work is of a similar character, I could have been more than three-quarters through a compressed version with the same effort.)

*As opposed to the often very long sentences used by Spengler, which can be paragraph-sized in their own right. (Also see below.)

The flow of the individual sentence is often highly confused, reminding me of a compass needle in the presence of magnetic disturbances. Hypothetical* example: A horse is a four-footed, in other words quadruped, animal, excelling in speed, contrary to the cow, whose digestive system is of the utmost complexity, and ridden, i.e. used as a means of transport, by humans, or dogs in a circus, the cow hardly ever being ridden, …

*Considering his complicated style and issues of idiom, I am loath to actually attempt a translation of a real example. Besides, I would need to make a re-download to find such an example. Note that I have not attempted to duplicate his style in any detail—I just try to bring the general impression of the compass needle across.

As for sentence structure, sentence length, and choice of words, he makes me look like Hemingway. I do not like to throw the first stone here, both because of the hypocrisy involved and because many failures to understand a sentence can be put more on the reader than on the writer. However, I readily admit that there were sentences that I had to re-read even to just understand them as sentences (as opposed to understand the idea or arguments presented by them—and the ideas and arguments were usually not hard to understand once the sentence had been deciphered). In a few cases, a sentence was also so long that I had to go back to the beginning in order to replenish my memory and to be able to put the end of the sentence in context…

The “reasoning” often consists of nothing more than claiming that something would be obvious, often drowned in a barrage of words. Spengler appears to continually confuse “personal belief” with “logical conclusion” and/or attempt to hide a lack of actual arguments through a flow of words.

Excursion on the actual contents:
Because I covered so small a portion of the overall work, I cannot make that many statements about the actual contents (as opposed to how the contents were written). However: On the one hand, Spengler and I seem to share a conviction that there are many lessons and, possibly, predictions to be drawn from past civilizations and phases of individual periods and fields*. (Also note sayings like “history repeats it self” and “those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it”.) I also share the general fear that the “Abendland” could, conceivably be approaching its “Untergang”; and the general idea that progress might be replaced by stagnation as a civilization develops.** On the other, his “Morphologie”*** takes this to such an extreme that it lacks plausibility and would likely be considered pseudo-science today. Going by a few tables with comparisons between civilizations, I also suspect that he has bent the data to fit his theory on more than one occasion. (Something almost impossible to avoid with the great difference in the developments that are considered morphologically equivalent…)

*For instance, I suspect that there are great similarities in the rise, flowering, and fall of this-or-that style of painting or music—not just empires.

**I note factors like that a lesser need to work hard in order to survive could lead a “softer” and less industrious population, that entertainment could grew more important than accomplishment, the risks of dysgenic pressure, and similar.

***Roughly speaking, that the development of a civilization follows a certain fix pattern with (on a historical scale) synchronously repeating stages of even areas like math and art. Unless the unread parts of the work contains strong arguments and examples, I see this as much too far-going.

Excursion on predictions:
Future prediction based on history should always be taken with a grain of salt—Asimov’s psychohistory will likely remain more fiction than science. A good example is H. G. Wells’ “The Shape of Things to Come”, which gets almost everything wrong—and when it gets something partially right, the flaws render the prediction almost comical. For instance, he does manage to predict a German–Polish war with far-reaching consequences around 1940, half-a-dozen years past the time of writing, but has the Germans barely able to keep up with the Poles and, in my recollection, had the Poles as the original aggressors.

A few thoughts around prose

What makes good or aesthetic prose and good (writing) style has been on my mind lately. A few particular issues:

1. I am not convinced that these matters are that important: Language is mostly a vehicle for something else*. By analogy, whether someone watches the same movie in VGA and mono or Ultra-HD and surround sound can make a difference—but it is far more important what movie is watched. If someone can get the point across with mediocre writing—is that not enough?

   *Exactly what depends on the work. Examples include a set of facts, a line of reasoning, a character portrait, a realistic depiction of life, a series of action scenes, a feeling of horror, …

   Some* authors have such an ability to write beautiful prose that it enhances the enjoyment of the text; however, they are a small minority and most best-selling** authors are fairly weak in this regard.

   *I can e.g. recall being highly impressed by some of Goethe’s and Thomas Mann’s works. Unsurprisingly, such authors often have a background heavy in poetry; surprisingly, they have often been German, possibly because the apparent unwieldiness of the German language has led to a compensating increase in skill. Shakespeare is an obvious English example, to the degree that his plays are considered prose.

   **This could partially be explained by the typically commercial and/or “low brow” character of best-selling material. However, (a) the basic principle of language as a vehicle applies even to “high literature”, (b) there are plenty of examples of high literature in unremarkable or even poor prose. (The German of Kafka, e.g., is in parts horrendous, yet he remains in high esteem.) The success of great literature when translated into other languages is a further argument, seeing that now the skills of the translator and the many obstacles to translation are of similar importance to the (prose) skills of the actual author.

   In terms of style, some limits* must be set, especially regarding clarity and (to some degree) conciseness. However, the limits needed for a reasonable vehicle are not all that high (assuming that grammatical correctness has been reached), and any intelligent college graduate should already have the skills to exceed them.

   *There are many writers, including a disturbing proportion of bloggers, journalists, and Wikipedia editors, who are so awful that they should better not write at all.

2. Verbosity* is a tricky issue. (And, in as far as it is negative, I am unusually poorly suited to throw the first stone.)

   *Here this word should be taken in a very wide sense, covering not just “needless words”, but also e.g. the inclusion of details of little importance, roundabout descriptions, unnecessary dialogue, … (No better generic term occurs to me.) Indeed, my focus below largely leaves the topics of prose and style, to focus on something more general.

   On the negative side, works like Pride and Prejudice show how verbosity can be taken too far, e.g. through turning the joy of reading into boredom or unduly increasing the time needed to read a work. Generally, text that does not serve a clear purpose, e.g. moving the story forward or giving nuance to a character, is often a negative and amounts to unnecessary filler. A good analogy is the low tempo and low content shown in many independent, low-budget, whatnot, movies—including those that begin with someone driving a car in silence for several minutes, then parking in silence, then walking to something in silence, with the first significant words uttered/events happening after five or more minutes. It would be better to condense the little information present* to a fraction of the time and just make the movie a little shorter—boring and artistic are not the same thing. Another analogy and partial example is the use of unnecessary adjectives and blurb in advertising language, as discussed in an older text on idiocies of ad writing (to which I might added the blanket advice to cut out any and all adjectives from an advertising text).

   *E.g. that a strategically placed photograph hints that the driver is married with two children, without the need to explicitly mention the fact—something that takes seconds, not minutes, to bring across. If worst comes to worst, doing a “Star Wars”-style introduction and skipping the car ride entirely would be the lesser evil… (Notably, if these car rides and whatnot are intended to serve another purpose, e.g. building atmosphere or tension, they usually fail equally badly at that. If they could pull it off, by all means—but it appears that they cannot.)

   On the positive side, it is often the small additional details that add charm to a work, that prevent it from being just a string of events, that give a marginal character that extra dash of individuality, etc. I have made some minor experiments with cutting out everything (apparently) non-essential from a text, and the result is so sterile and uninteresting that it makes a TV manuscript* a good read in comparison. The lesson is that, while any individual item that appears non-essential might actually be non-essential, removing too much kills the work.** While there is a point of “too much”, most amateurs are likely to fail clearly on the side of too little.*** There are even cases when something with no apparent major bearing on the overall plot/theme/whatnot cannot be cut without damaging the whole—consider e.g. “The Lord of the Rings” and the many detours and side-adventures. (Sometimes the road is more important than the apparent destination.) As a counter-point, I have usually found Stephen King more interesting as a short-story writer than as a novelist: While his ability to paint interesting portraits, give color to situations, find interesting developments, whatnot, might be his greatest strength, he often pushes it too far in his novels—and cutting another**** ten or twenty percent would be beneficial. Quality over quantity.

   *A TV manuscript, like most plays, is not intended to be read for entertainment—it is an instruction on how to create the entertainment. The difference might be less extreme than between a recipe and the finished food, but it goes somewhat in the same direction.

   **Also similar to a recipe: This-or-that ingredient might be foregoable entirely, another might only be needed in half the stated proportion, whatnot—individually. Remove/reduce all of them at once…

   ***My contacts with the works of amateurs have been very limited since I left school, but these contacts, my recollections from my school years, and my own preliminary dabblings with fiction all point in this direction. Indeed, it could be argued that this is the failure of the aforementioned independent movies, e.g. in that the car ride could have remained, had it been sufficiently filled with something interesting (and preferably relevant to plot, characters, whatnot).

   ****According to “On Writing”, he tries to cut ten percent from the first to the second draft.

   From another positive point of view, reality has details, and fiction with too little detail is unlikely to be realistic: Go for a walk in the forest and there will not just be trees around—there might not be a pack of wolves, but a squirrel, a few birds, and any number of insects is par for the course. (And a tree is not just a tall brown thing with small green things on it.) Take a train-ride and there will almost certainly be some unexpected event, even be it something as trivial as being asked for the time or someone falling over. Etc. Sometimes such details do more harm than good; sometimes they are exactly what is needed. (Do not ask me when: I am very far from having developed the detail judgment.)

   The trick is likely a mixture of finding the right middle ground and gaining a feel for which “extras” are merely unnecessary filler and which actually bring value to the text—add color, but do not lose tempo. Chances are that the drives for detail and relevance can be combined, e.g. in that an event written just for color is re-written to actually tell us something about the character(s).

3. The use of various connecting words and “preambles”* is an aspect of my own (non-fiction) writing that has long left me ambivalent: On the one hand, they do serve a deliberate, connecting purpose that enhances the text in some regards; on the other, I am often left with the feeling of a lack of “smoothness” and of too many words that only have an auxiliary character—or even the fear that I would be annoyed when encountering such an amount in texts by others.

   *E.g. “However, […]”, “To boot, […]”, “Notably, […]”, “On the other hand, […]”, etc.

   Looking at almost all texts that I read, including by successful fiction writers, such words are used far less often, and much more of the job of making connections is left to the reader (who, judging by myself, is only very rarely impeded). My background in software development (where the text given to the computer should leave as little room for ambiguity as possible) makes me loath to change my habit, but chances are that I do take it too far even in non-fiction context—and in a fiction context, this habit could be deadly.

4. I am often troubled by (and some of the previous item goes back to) the limited mechanisms for formal clues concerning the syntactic/semantic/whatnot groupings and intentions of a text. A recurring sub-issue is the use of commata, the comma being used in a great number of roles* in writing, which often forces me to deliberately hold back on my use, lest my texts be littered with them.

   *Including e.g. as a list separator, as a separator of main and subordinate clause, as an indicator of parenthesis, … The situation is made worse in my case, because different languages have different rules, and I am underway in three different languages. (For instance, according to English rules, a text might correctly include “the horse that won”. According to German rules, this would be “the horse, that won”. Also note the contrast to the English “the horse, which won”, with a slightly different meaning.)

   For instance, if we consider a sentence like “the brown horse ran fast and won by a large margin” there is a considerable amount of “parsing” left to the reader—and parsing that largely hinges on knowing what various words mean/can mean in context*. Grouping the individual words by structure, we might end up with “(the (brown horse)) ((ran fast) and (won (by (a (large margin))))”—while a sentence like “the horse and the mule […]” would result in the very different “((the horse) and (the mule)) […]”, giving some indication of how tricky the interpretation is.** (And such a mere grouping is far from a complete analysis—in fact, I relied on previous analysis, e.g. the identification of “horse” as a noun and “won” as a verb, when performing it.)

   *Not all words have a unique interpretation. Consider e.g. garden-path sentences or absurdities like “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.”, which actually is a complete sentence with an intended meaning.

   **Humans rarely notice this, unless they are learning a new language or the sentence is unusually tricky, because these steps take place unconsciously.

   Fields like linguistics and computer science approach such problems through use of very different representations, notably tree structures, that are capable of removing related issues of ambiguity, needing* to know what every word means, etc., and I often wish that everyday language would use some similar type of representation. As is, I stretch the boundaries of what language allows to express my intention—to the point that often I catch myself using “e.g.” and “i.e.” more as interpunctuation (in an extended sense) than as formulation. (Which explains my arguable overuse: In my own mind, they register more like a comma or a semi-colon does, than like “for instance”.)

   *With some reservations for words recognizable in their role through various hints or context. The classic example in English is the “-ly” suffix as a (far from perfect) hint that a word is an adverb.

5. As an interesting special case of the previous item, the use of commata and semi-colons is often contra-intuitive: If we view the comma (“,”), semi-colon (“;”), colon (”:”) and full-stop (“.”) as differently strong “stops”,* which is common and has some historical justification, then a sentence like “I found red, green, and yellow apples” simply does not make sense. We might argue that the separation of “red”, “green”, and “yellow” is warranted; however, at the same time we want them to be (individually or collectively) attached to both “I found” and “apples”—which is simply not the case if the commata are viewed as stops.**

   *Here we see another case of characters doing double duty: Among the multiple roles of quotation marks we have both the signification of a literal string and of something metaphorical or approximate. Different signs for these roles, the role as an actual quote, the “scare quote” role, and whatever else might apply, would be neat. (Then again, most people would likely be over-challenged with such a system, and it would degenerate back into something less differentiated—a problem that might kill quite a few potential improvements.)

   **But note that this problem disappears with appropriate grouping, like “I found (red, green, and yellow) apples.”, which would be one way out. A better way, disconnected from the interpretation as stops, is to see the sentence as an abbreviation of the cumbersome “I found read apples and I found green apples and I found yellow apples”.

   In some cases, the problem could be limited by the prior introduction of a stronger stop*; however, this would often lead to awkward results and/or be incompatible with established use. For instance, “examples of apple colors: red, green, yellow” would be OK (in a context where this is stylistically tolerable), but “examples of apples colors are: red, green, yellow” is extremely odd. This solution is similar awkward for the original example (“I found: red, green, and yellow apples”) and leaves the original problem unsolved—“I found” is now offset, but “apples” is not. We might get by with “I found: red, green, and yellow: apples”, but this would be entirely unprecedented, hard to combine with any current interpretation of “:”, and better solved (assuming that an extension is suggested) by use of one of the bracket types**.

   *Note that the examples provided are somewhat different when “:” is viewed as a stop and when viewed as a “list introductor” or similar.

   **For instance, the scripting language Bash uses “{}” for a similar effect: The command “echo 1{a,b,c}2” results in the output “1a2 1b2 1c2”. (However, “()”, “[]”, and “<>” would be equally conceivable. Other bracket types exist, but would be problematic with current keyboards.)

Excursion on “Catch-22”:
A draft extended the mention of Kafka with “Joseph Heller, whose ‘Catch-22’ I am currently reading, appears to be a similar English example”. If this book is considered “high literature”, it is indeed a good example; however, I am highly skeptical to this classification: Apart from a few good laughs and the eponymous “catch”, the first hundred-or-so pages has had very little to offer of anything—and give the impression that the author has just sat down by the keyboard, written down whatever occurred to him in the moment, and then sent the resulting draft to be published. There are, incidentally, some Kafkaesque setups, but I would recommend Kafka, himself, to those looking for the Kafkaesque. It might be that the book makes more sense to someone who has lived in a similar setting or it might be that the remainder is better; however, my current feel is that this is yet another book that has gained its reputation due to popularity—not literary quality.