Matters of focus

So I'm reading an article about garden hoses: Which are the best for my needs? and all that. And the first part is really interesting: They "review the features to consider" when buying a hose. But then we get past that part and come to Types of Garden Hoses. Here's the first type they consider:

Lightweight / Light Duty Hoses

These hoses are generally made from vinyl (sometimes with a reinforcing mesh or multiple plies (layers)) so can kink more easily, often have plastic fittings, and tend to come in thinner diameters but prices are in the lower range.

If you’re gardening on a budget, won’t be using it often, don’t need a long hose (over 50 feet), and have lower water pressure or don’t use a sprinkler or hose nozzle, then a lightweight hose will probably meet your needs.

While you can find light duty hoses online, your best bet is to visit your local home improvement store or garden center. You’ll find some of the heavier duty hoses there as well, but many of them are perfect for light duty use.

Skip over that first paragraph. Get to the second. We have four deciding conditions... Five, really:

1. budget,
2. usage,
3. length,
4. water pressure, and
5. what you have on the end of the hose

Yeah, all that. And whether you use "Quick Connect" fittings on your hoses. If you do use these "Cuke" fittings, you don't really need anything better than plastic fittings on the hoses. Because your Cuke fittings will be permanently attached to the hose, so you're not threatening to damage the plastic fittings on a regular basis.

Yeah, this comes up because my wife found a bargain on Amazon, and asked if I'd rather have four fifty-foot shrinkys with plastic end fittings, or one with brass.

Brass, I said without any hesitation. But then there was a second thought, and the second thought was that I always put brass QCs on both ends of those hoses, so who gives a shit if the GHT ends are plastic? Really. But it was too late. She pressed one button and the thing was bought.

I mean, I coulda had four fifties. But I got one instead, just so I could have some brass ass that I'll never connect to a second time. Dumn motherfuhhhhhh...

Oh, well. If it comes around on the guitar again I'll be ready.

//

So, okay. That's all well and good, but their third parag says

While you can find light duty hoses online, your best bet is to visit your local home improvement store or garden center. You’ll find some of the heavier duty hoses there as well, but many of them are perfect for light duty use.

So... after all that... it seems that some of the "heavier duty hoses" are just as good as the light duties for some applications...

Carefully worded

"At Lowes," the commercial says, "we've got more appliances than anyone else."

Well yeah, I bet they do. And at Home Depot, Home Depot has more appliances than anyone else. And at my house, I have more appliances than anyone else.

It's all in the wording.

I wrote one the other day for my econ blog. The topic was "demand deposits". Reviewing it the next day, I paused to double-check the definition of the term. Google says

a deposit of money that can be withdrawn without prior notice.

You know, like your checking account.

Among the results, I found a link to What is the difference between a checking account, a demand deposit account, and a NOW (negotiable order of withdrawal) account? Sounded interesting ((to me)) so I clicked.

It is a page from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. First time I ever ended up there. Wikipedia says

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), also known as the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP), is an agency of the United States government responsible for consumer protection in the financial sector...

The CFPB's creation was authorized by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, whose passage in 2010 was a legislative response to the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the subsequent Great Recession.

Looking around the site, down at the bottom of the page I noticed a "plain writing" link. Plain writing? This I had to see! But I went first to Orange Crate Art to see if Michael Leddy has anything on the Plain Writing Act. Nope. But Google turned up a link to Beware of the saurus¹, and that sounded interesting. Michael's advice was

What student-writers need to realize is that it's not ornate vocabulary or word-substitution that makes good writing. Clarity, concision, and organization are far more important in engaging and persuading a reader to find merit in what you're saying.

Sounds good to me.

At the CFPB's Plain Writing page I find

Plain writing

The CFPB has adopted plain language as a core principle for all consumer-facing content.

The next sentence repeats that thought:

That means we apply plain language principles in all of our consumer materials.

Then they go into depth:

We follow plain language guidelines...

On the left they present a couple links, including Plain Writing Act. This, too, I had to see.

Plain Writing Act

The Plain Writing Act of 2010 promotes “clear Government communication that the public can understand and use.”

On October 13, 2010, President Obama signed the Plain Writing Act into law...

Trying to see what they think "clear communication" is, I clicked the link to see the Act. Here are some excerpts:

An Act to enhance citizen access to Government information and services by establishing that Government documents issued to the public must be written clearly, and for other purposes.

This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Plain Writing Act of 2010’’.

The term ‘‘plain writing’’ means writing that is clear, concise, well-organized, and follows other best practices appropriate to the subject or field and intended audience.

There ya go. Clear, concise, and well-organized.

Looking for something a little more explicit, I got to OMB Final Guidance on Implementing the Plain Writing Act of 2010 (M 11-15). It says

The Plain Writing Act of 2010 (the Act) (Public Law 111-274), which the President signed into law on October 13, 2010, calls for writing that is clear, concise, and well-organized.

And it provides a link to View Guidance on Implementing the Plain Writing Act. That brings up a six-page PDF where we find this:

As defined in the Act, plain writing is writing that is clear, concise, well-organized, and consistent with other best practices appropriate to the subject or field and intended audience. Such writing avoids jargon, redundancy, ambiguity, and obscurity.

But most of the PDF was about "Implementing the Plain Writing Act of 2010", which I didn't need.

The PDF does also say

When drafting covered documents, your agency should follow the Federal Plain Language Guidelines available at http://www.plainlanguage.gov/howto/guidelines/bigdoc/TOC.cfm.

I clicked that link and it redirected me to Federal plain language guidelines:

These are the official guidelines for the Plain Writing Act of 2010. We developed these guidelines to help you and your agency write clearly...

Now we're getting there. But it's a short page: only four paragraphs. Where are the guidelines? Oh! You can download a PDF. So I did.

118 pages.

"Infinite" versus "Endless"

"Infinite" is a practical impossibility.
"Endless" happens all the time.

Almost 70 years old before I figured out the difference.

Sometimes you just don't need a "for instance"

From MarketWatch: Computers are getting more expensive and here’s why, July 2017:

“Vendors raise the price for both new and existing models,” she said. “For instance, a model A used to be $500, but the same model A with same configuration is now $550.”

How to make writing more interesting

I have no idea.

Quick! What's this sentence about?

From How inequalities of wealth matter for consumption by Nick Bunker:

A person would only change his or her consumption patterns if his or her lifetime income changed, but wouldn’t change his or her spending much if he or she experienced a temporary increase or decrease in spending.

First reaction: The sentence seems to be about gender politeness.
Second reaction: I'm not reading any more of that.

"at least I mean what I say"

IZQuotes

Which two of these statements mean the same?

1. Every draft is a Bill of Exchange
2. Every draft is not a Bill of Exchange
3. No draft is a Bill of Exchange

Number 2 means the same as number 3. Number 1 means the opposite. Easy, right? You'd think so.

How bout this:

1. Some drafts are Bills of Exchange.
2. Some drafts are not Bills of Exchange.
3. Not every draft is a Bill of Exchange.

All three are equivalent this time.

When you say "not every one of them is X" it means NOT ALL of them are X, but SOME are.

When you say "every one of them is not X" it means NONE are X.

If I say "all of them are X" it should be obvious what I mean. If I say "all of them are NOT X" it should be equally obvious what I mean. When I say "ALL of them are not" I do not mean SOME of them are. I mean ALL of them are not, and NONE of them are.

Petty, right? But if you don't know petty stuff like this, you cannot say things that are logical. And if you try, you will probably get things wrong.

Here's a clip from pages 215 & 216 of The Foreign Trade of the United States: Its Character, Organization and Methods, a Google Book by Lillian Cummings Ford and Thomas Francis Ford. At the bottom of page 215 is part of the phrase "Digitized by Google":

I don't know what the hell that paragraph means.

They point out that in common usage, the terms "draft" and "bill of exchange" mean the same. Then they say that "strictly", NO draft is a Bill of Exchange. I think they mean to say that, strictly, only SOME drafts are Bills of Exchange. But they don't say SOME. They say ALL. They say ALL ARE NOT.

I can read the following sentence, where they say "a draft is not necessarily a negotiable instrument". The "not necessarily" part tells me that some drafts are negotiable and some are not. So the word SOME comes in by a back door.

They repeat the confusion in their last sentence: They say Bills of Exchange are the most common form of draft (again implying SOME) but conclude by stating clearly that "every draft is not a bill of exchange." No draft is a bill of exchange. That's the conclusion of the paragraph, and that's what they want me to understand.

No draft is a bill of exchange.

Look... I think I can figure out what they mean. But if I am using their book to learn something, the only thing I learn for sure is that they do not say what they mean.

In fact, they say the opposite of what they mean!

Simple

Eric Hoffer:

There is no reason why the profoundest thoughts should not make easy and exciting reading. A profound thought is an exciting thing — as exciting as a detective's deductions or hunches. The simpler the words in which a thought is expressed the more stimulating its effect.

'words dilute meaning'

Eric Hoffer:

Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.

There is not an idea that cannot be expressed in 200 words. But the writer must know precisely what he wants to say. If you have nothing to say and want badly to say it, then all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice.

Apparently I'm out of the loop

These days, words seem to change faster even than technology. I was at Forbes trying to read Adam Ozimek amid all the flashy things on the screen. In the sidebar, Star Wars caught my eye:

Star Wars, and the bare arms below it:

How to make your side...

My side?

How to make your side hustle...

Hustle? I was expecting something like How to make your side pain go away...

Does my side hustle? Does my side not hustle enough? Who is on my side? Is this a Conservative/Liberal thing?

All this goes thru my mind before I get to the next word. When I read, I try to assemble the meaning as I go. I don't wait till I get to the end, then gather up the pieces and try to fit them together. I try to make sense of what I'm reading as I go.

Maybe not everybody does that.

How to make your side hustle your main hustle...

Yeah...?

...from a woman who did it.

Oh! A "side hustle" is something you do. Okay. They mean like a business. How to make your side business into your main business. Yeah, that makes sense now.

What a lot of work this is, for nothing.


Did you see me pause there? Pause and say "yeah" and wait, and not try to guess what they were talking about? They forced me to wait to the end, then try to fit the pieces together in order to understand what they said.

It was "side hustle" that did it. It's a new word, new to me. I didn't get the meaning. Maybe if they flagged the term by putting it in quotes it would have been easier to figure the meaning. But hell no! That would ruin the effect. The effect is achieved by going with the flow, new term, new word, new phrase, run with it.

Run with it. Otherwise you're out of the loop ...

I can't even guess what the new speak might be.


They forced me to wait to the end, by using unfamiliar new terminology. Side hustle. Who knew? They could have put it in quotes. Or they could have made it into one word: sidehustle. Or side-ussle maybe, the way people would say it.

For sure, nobody has time for an "H" these days.

// here's the interesting part

So anyway our new word si'dussle comes from the English hustle. Google lists a few meanings for hustle, including:

1. to "force (someone) to move hurriedly", or
2. to "obtain by forceful action or persuasion."

The latter sense of the term is "North American informal" and includes three branches:

2a. to "coerce or pressure someone into doing or choosing something."
2b. to "sell aggressively."
2c. to "obtain by illicit action; swindle; cheat."

Coerce to action, sell aggressively, swindle and cheat. Given these related meanings, it is interesting to observe that the word "hustle" has come to mean "business".

That reminds me of the archaic meaning of invest: to "surround (a place) in order to besiege or blockade it." That's a good match to the current meaning: to "devote (one's time, effort, or energy) to a particular undertaking with the expectation of a worthwhile result."

Yeah, by "a worthwhile result" they don't mean something like a hobby. They mean something like a takeover.

// on a related note

On a related note, our word business comes from the Old English busyness.

Busyness is to hustle as business is to sidussle.


Google shows similar usage patterns for "business" and "hustle". Increase since the latter 1800s, peak around the Great Depression, reaching bottom around 1970 or 1980, and then increase resumes:

I can't help thinking those patterns bear some relation to this one:

There are lags, of course. "Long and variable" lags.


When I read, I try to assemble the meaning as I go. When I write, I try to make it so you can do the same. I don't want you to have to stop and back up and try to work things out. It's my job as writer to do that part. When you read what I wrote, I want it to go down easy. In the struggle to convey information, that's half the battle.