The present information overload:
"As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe...."
-- Denis Diderot, French Encyclopaedist, 1755.
I recommend the whole thing.
@dredmorbius Where does your aversion to adjectives stem from?
@fce "Show, don't tell."
It's a classic clickbait or false-significance tactic: /telling/ someone /that/ they should be impressed, or how to react "will shock you", "you will be amazed!", rather than clearly describing the thing such that you arrive at the response yourself.
At the very least, I will bury my recommendations and superlatives at the /end/ (or at least middle) of a piece, rather than the lede.
The lede tells who, what, why, where, when, how.
@dredmorbius Jimmy Dore has a parody formula: "What happens next may surprise you.... Or will it?"
@dredmorbius Right, those sensation-oriented headlines are a surefire way to identify clickbait. It's like an extreme version of yellow press tbh.
It just sounded like you had some general problem with adjectives, but in this context I can completely understand :D
@fce Well ... adjectives and I ... I prefer /not/ dragging personal relationship matters out in public...
:smile:
@dredmorbius When was the last time you read a book in order to learn something?
@Masek Do you want that in seconds or minutes?
@dredmorbius Months would be enough ;-)
Originally from the staggeringly amazing and awesome -- I hate to use adjectives, but there's no other way to describe this -- Online History of Information by Jeremy Norman, antiquarian bookseller.
A 2.8 million year collection, over 4,400 articles.
http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2877