XP: Wordsmithing

[SFJoe]

originally posted by VLM:
Maybe a little too close to home, eh?
Anyone recognize themselves?

You repeat yourself.

Questions of personal behavior aren't the same as questions of data, as you of all people should know.

 

[Ross Massey]

originally posted by fatboy:

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
Bryan Garner has a fun piece in the current ABA Journal .

"If I were to hazard a fairly educated guess, I’d say that American lawyers’ vocabularies range roughly from 45,000 to 135,000 words. Further, I’d guess that those who know 100,000 to 135,000 words have, on average, at least double the income of those who know only 45,000 to 70,000 words. I would also guess that there are many more lawyers at the lower end of the scale than at the higher end."

if i were to hazard a guess, i'd say that garner hasn't got even the faintest understanding of how language works or how words are distributed and is busily pulling his "facts" out of his ass.

so i guess it all depends on your idea of fun...

fb.

Obviously teh lawyerz never heard of Hapax legomenon

 

[David Erickson]

A population of people who have been forced to leave an original homeland and are now scattered around the globe constitute a diaspora.

At last, the dictionary definition. Thank you!

"Wordsmith" is a truly loathesome description of a writer. It suggests tinkering, hammering, or shaping something that already exists. It trivializes the work. I first heard the term back during the Jurassic Age, when I was a financial PR flack, from a client at Salomon Brothers. I complained about it to a colleague who said "Writing is the manual labor of the intellectual class," and without missing a beat, turned back to her keyboard. I did the same, but also thought to myself that of all the kinds of whoring a writer might do for a living, making Wall Street assholes look good was way, way down at the bottom of the profession. I left a few months later, moved out of NYC, and went to work as a clerk at the Brookline Liquor Mart.