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Song of the Rarest Large Whale on Earth Recorded for the First Time
- hombre_fatal 7y ago> There’s a lot the biologists don’t know about these songs. Like, uh, their purpose. Is this really considered an acceptable way to write these days? Incredibly sad to hear how there are <30 whales in this region. Especially when listening to one's calls. Wonder what kind of whale-to-whale range these songs have.
- TallGuyShort 7y ago>> Is this really considered an acceptable way to write these days? It's increasingly common in pop-journalism and click-baity content targeting social media. I'm not a big fan of it, but at least here it's conveying meaningful content - more often than not I see this style accompanying content swiped from Reddit with commentary that adds virtually nothing or even contradicts the content as though they didn't even read it fully.
- erikpukinskis 7y agoYes? It’s clear writing, it’s truthful and direct. You don’t like the style, but I’m sure there are many people who don’t like your preferred voice. The days of one acceptable voice in trade writing are gone, and that’s a good thing. It was creating a gate keeping effect whereby people who spoke well and clearly but not “right”—according to some ethnic cultural moors—were not taken seriously. Now everyone can be not taken seriously equally, each according to the weight of their words.
- marnett 7y agoI am all for using a more casual voice when writing about a subject for an audience outside of that particular domain of expertise. However, "Like, uh, their purpose." is grammatically and semantically meaningless. I am for using plain english to describe latin law terms. I am against colloquial, spoken styles slipping into written word.
- sov 7y ago> However, "Like, uh, their purpose." is grammatically and semantically meaningless How can something be grammatically meaningless? Further, because you're not able to understand the semantic meaning of a phrase does not mean it has no semantic meaning. I don't understand German--is German semantically meaningless? > I am all for using a more casual voice > I am against colloquial, spoken styles slipping into written word Are these not contrary to one another?
- marnett 7y agoRemoving the filler "uh" the sentence becomes "Like their purpose." Which could be semantically understood as "[I/He/They] Like (or enjoy) their (whale's song) purpose." A semantically ambiguous sentence is just that, ambiguous. This sentence can have multiple meanings. Also, conflating dialects, verbal fillers, and languages is asinine and you know that is not what my original point was. Writing casually about an expert domain is like, uh, different than writing spoken word as written, ya know?
- jacobush 7y agoIt adds emphasis. Translated: “Like, even their purpose!”
- sov 7y ago> Removing the filler "uh" the sentence becomes "Like their purpose." Which could be semantically understood as "[I/He/They] Like (or enjoy) their (whale's song) purpose." A semantically ambiguous sentence is just that, ambiguous. This sentence can have multiple meanings. Your argument supporting your prior assertion that "the sentence has meaningless grammar/syntax" is that... if you remove part if it, the sentence ceases to make sense? Their sentence isn't semantically ambiguous. You may not understand the meaning of their sentence, but your experience is not everyone's experience. The word "uh" in the quoted sentence serves a particular purpose--it's an emphasis of the ridiculousness about how little we know with respect to the animals. Moreover, it's a very concise way of communicating that emphasis.
- jkaptur 7y ago"mores", pronounced "morays" :)
- elefanten 7y agoMaybe gp meant that ethnic-minority cultural Moors (read: like cultural Jews) have strong opinions about the prior gatekeeping effect of writing style conventions. =]
- erikpukinskis 7y agoNo, I just don’t know how to spell mores. :)
- gerdesj 7y ago"o tempora o mores" as some famous bloke once said. The world is going to hell in a handcart - or words to that effect. It really is so sad to hear about yet another iconic species shuffle (with unseemly haste) off to oblivion.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- beat 7y agoMakes me think... I listen to a lot of avant-garde jazz from the 1960s/1970s, and watch documentaries about it, and this leads to listening to the speech patterns of some of the greatest players. Many of these musicians are outright geniuses, but grew up under Jim Crow, and didn't go to college - sometimes, didn't finish any school at all. They're brilliant thinkers, but they speak in such a different way, they'd be written off as fools by people who can't imagine thinking outside of the western college system. Listen to Sun Ra, or Milford Graves, or Miles Davis. It's amazing.
- NinoScript 7y ago> Is this really considered an acceptable way to write these days? I guess it’s fine if your target audience includes people that will feel more confortable if you write like that. To me it depends on the subject, for some stuff I just want facts; but for stuff I know less about, I tend to prefer reading in a more casual tone.
- darkpuma 7y agoThat's really bizarre phrasing. Maybe it was a botched attempt at a porpoise pun?
- beat 7y agoYou're saying it's on porpoise?
- pergadad 7y agoNot just 30 in this region, its 30 of this subspecies.
- munificent 7y agoThis seems like a reasonable humorous form of emphasis to me. The full stop before "Like" is an intensifier to draw attention to that sentence. The "uh" indicates the author's surprise at how little the biologists know, which also intensifies the sentence.
- pvaldes 7y agoBiologists know perfectly the purpose of these songs: Communication, duh.
- rzzzt 7y agoAre they as rare as the 52 Hz whale? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/52-hertz_whale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/52-hertz_whale
- arthurcolle 7y agoWell there's one of this one, and one of the other one. If we consider them to be in the same category, I guess they would be equally rare. Maybe the deaf whale can be considered more rare because it has a Wikipedia entry.