7 ms·

That’s the preface, the study in question dealt with the opening of Chapter 1

jasonthorsness 1y ago
I like it “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.”
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority of people to be able to read this?
  - falcor84 1y ago
    I for one absolutely agree that reading this : reading books intended for transmitting information = swimming through molasses : swimming through water
    - KPGv2 1y ago
      It's physically impossible to swim through molasses. The analogy is either a failure or an insult.
      - AlexandrB 1y ago
        Is it? Syrup is swimmable: https://mythresults.com/swimming-in-syrup https://mythresults.com/swimming-in-syrup
        haiku2077 1y ago
        Molasses is a thicker concentrate, and is infamously deadly when it floods. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        falcor84 1y ago
        Everything is deadly when it floods, with water floods being responsible for about half of all deaths from global natural disasters [0]. The Wikipedia article you linked to describes the event but says nothing about swimming through it. There's a Scientific American article that analyzed this based on the Reynolds number [1] and arrived at a conclusion that you can't swim through molasses via regular symmetric motions and would need something different, which sounds quite appropriate for the analogy. [0] https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2101 https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2101 [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-physics-science/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-ph...
  - jcranmer 1y ago
    I suspect a majority of the population has no idea what "Michaelmas term" is. And there's some other phrases in there that require some familiarity with things commonplace in the 19th century that aren't so in the 21st century.
    - layer8 1y ago
      The explanation is nowadays just a tap-and-hold away, however, on a mobile device.
    - 0xffff2 1y ago
      Count me among those who have no idea when Michaelmas is, but does it really matter? The next sentence tells you it is sometime around November. The whole passage is laden with overlapping context clues.
      - jcranmer 1y ago
        Per Wikipedia, Michaelmas term tends to around in mid-December, not in mid-November.
        0xffff2 1y ago
        Well then I guess it was an unseasonably warm December that year? Or perhaps the dates have changed? Regardless, I'm not at all convinced that it makes a significant difference to the story.
      - hluska 1y ago
        It’s a helpful detail that Dickens wrote for his Victorian readers. Michaelmas term refers to both the first academic term of the school year and the start of the legal year in the English courts system. Bleak House is about a court case that has gone on so long that nobody knows what it’s about. The case is about an inheritance and has dragged on for so long that the estate itself has been totally wiped out by legal fees. It has ruined lives and continues to ruin them but there is no end in sight even though there’s nothing left but fighting to fight over. It’s an inherited lawsuit and an inherited feud. Dickens had a lot of issues with the legal system at the time and it was a protest work.
  - KPGv2 1y ago
    As would I. It actually feels very "chat-ish." Two-word thoughts as sentences, etc. Like how I text. To my wife. Whenever we're on our computers in different locations. No need to edit. She gets it. So do you.
  - mschild 1y ago
    Anecdata: I found most people don't have an issue with the vocabulary itself but rather their attention spans. From what I've experienced from family members and friends, the younger ones seem to get exasperated by any longer amount of text that isn't in very simple English language. A friend told me his daughter was one of the few that could actually sit through a whole reading session in her 2nd grade class. And these are mostly pick and choose books so not really forced literature they don't enjoy.
  - Teever 1y ago
    I think it's very reasonable to expect that a majority (if not all) of university students to be able to read this but certainly not the general public. You have unrealistic expectations of the average person's ability to read complex literature and the vocabulary necessary to parse this piece of text.
  - jerf 1y ago
    The study itself [1] contains transcript fragments of students talking through what they think the passage means. In fact I feel I should remind you before you start reading it, even though the study also starts with this, that the subject of this study is not the population at large but specifically English majors in college. Not the most elite colleges, but still, I expect better. In the normative sense of "expect", not the descriptive sense... I'm well aware my expectations grossly exceed the reality, but I'm not moving them. [1]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
    - andoando 1y ago
      I guess I would not have done much better. >Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. >Facilitator: >O.K. >Subject: >There’s just fog everywhere. What deep insight is there to say about this sentence and this sentence alone? Reading the paper it seems like they want you to comment on how the fog is not just literal fog but a metaphor for the dirt and confusion in the city, but reading it sentence to sentence like this, what much is there to say about it?
      - lelandfe 1y ago
        Without reading the paper… There seems to be fog everywhere - but it’s the beautiful and natural fog of London intermingling with the stinking haze of pollution. The use of “great” is interesting because it seems like the city was about to be presented as “bad.” But there’s more to it.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - photonthug 1y ago
        First layer: Literally yes, there's fog everywhere. It gets around. Second layer: Interesting contrast of something clean and natural meeting something industrial and dirty. Voices, who is speaking, where from, and with what perspective? Themes of liminality / phase-change / obscured visibility / motion. Those tiers of shipping mean that some other stuff besides fog gets around. Third layer: Generalizing a bit, if natural things enter into a blackened, dirty hub of artificial industrial and commercial activity, they can become unclean. Questions: Is man not also natural thing? Foreshadowing: What happens to the heart and soul of a man in an overcrowded, dirty, artificial setting? Can what was once clean and then dirty be made clean again? What does all the motion actually move towards? Where will the shipping go, and will the fog see the meadow again, and will man be able find his heart?
- jazzypants 1y ago
  That's not unreadable, it's captivating!
- B1FF_PSUVM 1y ago
  Short sentences, too. Some people like to ramble on for quite a few lines before reaching for a period.
- slowmovintarget 1y ago
  So it opens with a tone poem. Unsurprising that readers must be encouraged to improve their attention spans. ("Git gud at readin'")
- colinwilyb 1y ago
  When I write, it comes out like this. Pulling your attention to and fro across a scene to construct "brain pictures", letting your imagination fill in the gaps as the fragments become a whole. The mention of Megalosaurus was jarring. My imagination placed this within a gloomy late-Victorian period and the mention of giant lizard caused mental association to very unrelated content for the rest of paragraph. I think a Wooly Mammoth waddling up the hill would make for a better picture. On another note: What are horse blinkers?
  - mrob 1y ago
    Bleak House was first serialized in 1852. The famous Crystal Palace Dinosaurs were commissioned in 1852 and first shown to the public in 1854. The timing lines up with dinosaurs being something new and exciting to the readers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs The collection includes an (inaccurate) model of a Megalosaurus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Crystal_Palace_-_Victorian_Dinosaurs_1_4887762470.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Cry... Horse blinkers are things that restrict a horse's field of vision to directly in front of it so it's less likely to get startled or distracted. Readers would also have been familiar with them, because they were commonly used with horses pulling carriages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkers_(horse_tack) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkers_(horse_tack)
- deltarholamda 1y ago
  Summarizers will shorten this to something like "It was very muddy in London." Very lossy compression.
- StefanBatory 1y ago
  I'm not a native speaker, but I feel this isn't that hard to read? Maybe not if I was in a wrong headspace, but I can get the gist looking at it. Question would be, what is Michaelmas? My first thought would be it's a prime minister or president, but I'd need to ask for context. If so, their term has just finished and there's a change in govt. Also, weather sucks so much and it's so muddy, the streets resemble more of some prehistoric places :P Holborn Hill is some place, part of me would say it's a street, English naming is weird. Also I'd say that the role of those sentences is retardation to slow the reading down and to paint a dreary picture. Unless I'm falling into a trap and overestimating my comprehension.
  - mkehrt 1y ago
    Michelmas is a holiday in September. Michelmas term is a British school term (fall term, I guess) and apparently also means the beginning of the legal year.
ryandv 1y ago
I still don't see the issue. Do people really have difficulty reading this level of English?
- Filmatic 1y ago
  Yes. They do in fact find this easy-to-read and straightforward passage challenging, or even impenetrable. A key problem seems to be that more than half of folks either have functionally no working memory, or for some reason fail to exercise it whatsoever when reading. They can't retain one or two subjects or actions or details about setting in their head while they read on a few more words to see how the passage comes together. As soon as you ask them to hold any amount of context past the end of a sentence, they'll judge your writing "difficult", or in even harsher terms. The brighter of this set will latch on to Hemingway's preferences as gospel and declare that anything harder to swallow than cotton candy is simply bad. Never mind that most of these folks probably struggle to understand Hemingway, too. I don't know whether this has always been the case, or it's something that has changed over time. I suspect the latter, and that the rise of radio and especially TV had exactly the effects that critics worried they would, but have no data to back it up. Just a hunch.
pitpatagain 1y ago
The preface is much more circuitous and difficult than the opening of Chapter 1. The opening of Chapter 1 is very vivid and descriptive, but pretty straightforward, even the archaic stuff in it you really should be able to guess at from context. Is it the easiest thing to read? No. Should university English majors be able to read it? Good grief, yes, this is such a wildly low bar.
zapw 1y ago
Since other commenters seem to think that the passage is just the first paragraph of chapter 1 (the fact of which suggests its own meta-commentary on the content of the article), it's worth mentioning that the passage is the first seven paragraphs of chapter 1, in which there are definitely some challenging sections, particularly in the later paragraphs.

I like it “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.”

datadrivenangel 1y ago
It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority of people to be able to read this?
- falcor84 1y ago
  I for one absolutely agree that reading this : reading books intended for transmitting information = swimming through molasses : swimming through water
  - KPGv2 1y ago
    It's physically impossible to swim through molasses. The analogy is either a failure or an insult.
    - AlexandrB 1y ago
      Is it? Syrup is swimmable: https://mythresults.com/swimming-in-syrup https://mythresults.com/swimming-in-syrup
      - haiku2077 1y ago
        Molasses is a thicker concentrate, and is infamously deadly when it floods. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        falcor84 1y ago
        Everything is deadly when it floods, with water floods being responsible for about half of all deaths from global natural disasters [0]. The Wikipedia article you linked to describes the event but says nothing about swimming through it. There's a Scientific American article that analyzed this based on the Reynolds number [1] and arrived at a conclusion that you can't swim through molasses via regular symmetric motions and would need something different, which sounds quite appropriate for the analogy. [0] https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2101 https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2101 [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-physics-science/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-ph...
- jcranmer 1y ago
  I suspect a majority of the population has no idea what "Michaelmas term" is. And there's some other phrases in there that require some familiarity with things commonplace in the 19th century that aren't so in the 21st century.
  - layer8 1y ago
    The explanation is nowadays just a tap-and-hold away, however, on a mobile device.
  - 0xffff2 1y ago
    Count me among those who have no idea when Michaelmas is, but does it really matter? The next sentence tells you it is sometime around November. The whole passage is laden with overlapping context clues.
    - jcranmer 1y ago
      Per Wikipedia, Michaelmas term tends to around in mid-December, not in mid-November.
      - 0xffff2 1y ago
        Well then I guess it was an unseasonably warm December that year? Or perhaps the dates have changed? Regardless, I'm not at all convinced that it makes a significant difference to the story.
    - hluska 1y ago
      It’s a helpful detail that Dickens wrote for his Victorian readers. Michaelmas term refers to both the first academic term of the school year and the start of the legal year in the English courts system. Bleak House is about a court case that has gone on so long that nobody knows what it’s about. The case is about an inheritance and has dragged on for so long that the estate itself has been totally wiped out by legal fees. It has ruined lives and continues to ruin them but there is no end in sight even though there’s nothing left but fighting to fight over. It’s an inherited lawsuit and an inherited feud. Dickens had a lot of issues with the legal system at the time and it was a protest work.
- KPGv2 1y ago
  As would I. It actually feels very "chat-ish." Two-word thoughts as sentences, etc. Like how I text. To my wife. Whenever we're on our computers in different locations. No need to edit. She gets it. So do you.
- mschild 1y ago
  Anecdata: I found most people don't have an issue with the vocabulary itself but rather their attention spans. From what I've experienced from family members and friends, the younger ones seem to get exasperated by any longer amount of text that isn't in very simple English language. A friend told me his daughter was one of the few that could actually sit through a whole reading session in her 2nd grade class. And these are mostly pick and choose books so not really forced literature they don't enjoy.
- Teever 1y ago
  I think it's very reasonable to expect that a majority (if not all) of university students to be able to read this but certainly not the general public. You have unrealistic expectations of the average person's ability to read complex literature and the vocabulary necessary to parse this piece of text.
- jerf 1y ago
  The study itself [1] contains transcript fragments of students talking through what they think the passage means. In fact I feel I should remind you before you start reading it, even though the study also starts with this, that the subject of this study is not the population at large but specifically English majors in college. Not the most elite colleges, but still, I expect better. In the normative sense of "expect", not the descriptive sense... I'm well aware my expectations grossly exceed the reality, but I'm not moving them. [1]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
  - andoando 1y ago
    I guess I would not have done much better. >Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. >Facilitator: >O.K. >Subject: >There’s just fog everywhere. What deep insight is there to say about this sentence and this sentence alone? Reading the paper it seems like they want you to comment on how the fog is not just literal fog but a metaphor for the dirt and confusion in the city, but reading it sentence to sentence like this, what much is there to say about it?
    - lelandfe 1y ago
      Without reading the paper… There seems to be fog everywhere - but it’s the beautiful and natural fog of London intermingling with the stinking haze of pollution. The use of “great” is interesting because it seems like the city was about to be presented as “bad.” But there’s more to it.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - photonthug 1y ago
      First layer: Literally yes, there's fog everywhere. It gets around. Second layer: Interesting contrast of something clean and natural meeting something industrial and dirty. Voices, who is speaking, where from, and with what perspective? Themes of liminality / phase-change / obscured visibility / motion. Those tiers of shipping mean that some other stuff besides fog gets around. Third layer: Generalizing a bit, if natural things enter into a blackened, dirty hub of artificial industrial and commercial activity, they can become unclean. Questions: Is man not also natural thing? Foreshadowing: What happens to the heart and soul of a man in an overcrowded, dirty, artificial setting? Can what was once clean and then dirty be made clean again? What does all the motion actually move towards? Where will the shipping go, and will the fog see the meadow again, and will man be able find his heart?
jazzypants 1y ago
That's not unreadable, it's captivating!
B1FF_PSUVM 1y ago
Short sentences, too. Some people like to ramble on for quite a few lines before reaching for a period.
slowmovintarget 1y ago
So it opens with a tone poem. Unsurprising that readers must be encouraged to improve their attention spans. ("Git gud at readin'")
colinwilyb 1y ago
When I write, it comes out like this. Pulling your attention to and fro across a scene to construct "brain pictures", letting your imagination fill in the gaps as the fragments become a whole. The mention of Megalosaurus was jarring. My imagination placed this within a gloomy late-Victorian period and the mention of giant lizard caused mental association to very unrelated content for the rest of paragraph. I think a Wooly Mammoth waddling up the hill would make for a better picture. On another note: What are horse blinkers?
- mrob 1y ago
  Bleak House was first serialized in 1852. The famous Crystal Palace Dinosaurs were commissioned in 1852 and first shown to the public in 1854. The timing lines up with dinosaurs being something new and exciting to the readers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs The collection includes an (inaccurate) model of a Megalosaurus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Crystal_Palace_-_Victorian_Dinosaurs_1_4887762470.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Cry... Horse blinkers are things that restrict a horse's field of vision to directly in front of it so it's less likely to get startled or distracted. Readers would also have been familiar with them, because they were commonly used with horses pulling carriages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkers_(horse_tack) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkers_(horse_tack)
deltarholamda 1y ago
Summarizers will shorten this to something like "It was very muddy in London." Very lossy compression.
StefanBatory 1y ago
I'm not a native speaker, but I feel this isn't that hard to read? Maybe not if I was in a wrong headspace, but I can get the gist looking at it. Question would be, what is Michaelmas? My first thought would be it's a prime minister or president, but I'd need to ask for context. If so, their term has just finished and there's a change in govt. Also, weather sucks so much and it's so muddy, the streets resemble more of some prehistoric places :P Holborn Hill is some place, part of me would say it's a street, English naming is weird. Also I'd say that the role of those sentences is retardation to slow the reading down and to paint a dreary picture. Unless I'm falling into a trap and overestimating my comprehension.
- mkehrt 1y ago
  Michelmas is a holiday in September. Michelmas term is a British school term (fall term, I guess) and apparently also means the beginning of the legal year.

ryandv 1y ago

I still don't see the issue. Do people really have difficulty reading this level of English?

Filmatic 1y ago
Yes. They do in fact find this easy-to-read and straightforward passage challenging, or even impenetrable. A key problem seems to be that more than half of folks either have functionally no working memory, or for some reason fail to exercise it whatsoever when reading. They can't retain one or two subjects or actions or details about setting in their head while they read on a few more words to see how the passage comes together. As soon as you ask them to hold any amount of context past the end of a sentence, they'll judge your writing "difficult", or in even harsher terms. The brighter of this set will latch on to Hemingway's preferences as gospel and declare that anything harder to swallow than cotton candy is simply bad. Never mind that most of these folks probably struggle to understand Hemingway, too. I don't know whether this has always been the case, or it's something that has changed over time. I suspect the latter, and that the rise of radio and especially TV had exactly the effects that critics worried they would, but have no data to back it up. Just a hunch.

pitpatagain 1y ago

The preface is much more circuitous and difficult than the opening of Chapter 1. The opening of Chapter 1 is very vivid and descriptive, but pretty straightforward, even the archaic stuff in it you really should be able to guess at from context. Is it the easiest thing to read? No. Should university English majors be able to read it? Good grief, yes, this is such a wildly low bar.

zapw 1y ago

Since other commenters seem to think that the passage is just the first paragraph of chapter 1 (the fact of which suggests its own meta-commentary on the content of the article), it's worth mentioning that the passage is the first seven paragraphs of chapter 1, in which there are definitely some challenging sections, particularly in the later paragraphs.