yummybrainz
Joined 10 months ago
Joined 10 months ago
Sense 4a1 here, not 4c: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/synthetic
It's supposed to sound dry and depressing and somewhat sterile.
> It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
I think if someone deliberately obfuscates meaning to sound fancier when the point is to communicate information directly, sure, I'd agree. But writing is often art, and I think demanding effort from the reader is fair in that case. I wouldn't make a blanket generalization like that.
Both versions are great: the former is poetic and grand and would fit right in in a fantasy text; the latter is dry and informative and requires much less mental effort to translate and extract meaning from (though still more than "normal" text.
I could imagine a third version that's clearer than the second and still nearly as poetic as the first.
I'd be surprised if that were the case: seems like it'd violate some sort of "locality", where the future should depend entirely on the present state.
Is it just that there's unidentified present state that's perhaps more easily characterized by knowing the history? Or is it somehow unidentifiable in principle?