Worst Sentence?
Here's the worst sentence in Academic English that I've read lately. It's the first sentence in a paragraph (i.e., it's not summarizing something he's said before).
"For a human characteristic, such as empathy, that is so pervasive, develops so early in life (e.g., Hoffman 1975; Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow 1990), and shows such important neural and physiological correlates (e.g., Adolphs et al. 1994; Rimm-Kaufman & Kagan 1996; Decety and Chaminade 2003) as well as a genetic substrate (Plomin et al. 1993), it would be strange indeed if no evolutionary continuity existed with other mammals."
-Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 24
Has anyone seen anything worse lately?
"For a human characteristic, such as empathy, that is so pervasive, develops so early in life (e.g., Hoffman 1975; Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow 1990), and shows such important neural and physiological correlates (e.g., Adolphs et al. 1994; Rimm-Kaufman & Kagan 1996; Decety and Chaminade 2003) as well as a genetic substrate (Plomin et al. 1993), it would be strange indeed if no evolutionary continuity existed with other mammals."
-Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 24
Has anyone seen anything worse lately?
posted by Charles P. Everitt at 7:10 AM
6 Comments:
You're kidding, right? Ignore the parentheses, and that's one of the clearest sentences I've read in a while.
Anyways, back to Lacan for me (and no, I'm not joking).
I wasn't kidding. Not at all. Then again, I haven't been reading Lacan lately. I'm sure there's something in what you're reading of Lacan's that's got de Waal beat hands down.
My problem with de Waal is a little different that my problem with Lacan, though. (And it isn't just the parantheses.) With de Waal, I think I know what he's saying and I think it wouldn't have been hard for him to have put his point more clearly. For example, he could've said the following:
"It would be strange if human characteristics such as emphathy were completely discontinuous with characteristics possessed by other mammals. After all, empathy is pervasive, develops early in life, shows important neural and physiological correlates, and has a genetic substrate."
Compare that with:
"For a human characteristic, such as empathy, that is so pervasive, develops so early in life (e.g., Hoffman 1975; Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow 1990), and shows such important neural and physiological correlates (e.g., Adolphs et al. 1994; Rimm-Kaufman & Kagan 1996; Decety and Chaminade 2003) as well as a genetic substrate (Plomin et al. 1993), it would be strange indeed if no evolutionary continuity existed with other mammals."
I'm reading this unpublished translation of some transcripts of Lacan's seminars (don't ask why), and it's simply intolerable. I don't know how much of the fault is Lacan's and how much is the translators, but here's a representative sentence:
It is nto at all, in short, so easya to imagine, but after all it is not so simple to give a schema of it that is so favourable to retain us, if on the other hand in discourse, in the Hegelian discourse for example, and this admirable prologue to The phenomenology, that Heidegger isolates in the Holzwege to give a long commentary of it, but which just by itself in two, three really admirable, unbelievable, sensational pages which just by themselves would be enough to give the essence of the sense of The phenomenology, we see there being designated somewhere this point of return of consciousness as the only necessary point where the loop can be completed and nowhere better than in this text is there demonstrated...
Never mind, I don't want to type out the rest. I'm seriously at the halfway point of this sentence--no shit.
Reading that makes me wonder what it would be like to have a conversation with someone like Lacan. Does he speak like that all the time? I mean, is he able to clearly express normal thoughts, about more mundane issues?
Hey, are you coming up this weekend?
Yeah, I think I'm finally going to be able to make it up on Saturday. If we go to that party you mentioned and it ends up running late, can we crash on your floor?
Let's do it.
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