Clear is not jargon free


Common sense is not common grammar. It's all I have to say to this: A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back

Well... This is beyond the back and forth between Butler and Philosophy and Literature: A sentence is clear iff is grammatically correct.* That's why clearness is not deliverance of jargon: a sentence can be written completely in jargon and still be clear; the fact that we don't know the meaning of the terms cannot be the rule by which we measure clearness. Of course, a grammatically correct sentence can be devoid of meaning among other ways by introducing meaningless jargon; yet this has very little to do with what clears means in a discussion of ordinary sentences.** A lot of jargon mumbo-jumbo is derived, as so many have pointed out before me, from the fact that apparently meaningful terms are used in undefined ways. And so we have, for instance, the polemic about unconscious ideas (defined) and the unconscious (semi defined). What ordinarily aloud us to pass from v. gr. "clear" to "clearness" is ordinary grammar; yet, we cannot expect that it will solve all our problems, especially if we begin to load clearness, for example, with a whole host of characteristics that cannot be derived from converting an adjective into a name. I could say, for argument sake, that clearness is also socially constructed. We can try to make sense of the sentence by exploring our initial sentence about clear sentences and then agree or disagree about the meaning of my social remark, yet any ensuing claim of me being misunderstood will be my fault for I never gave a definition of what I meant by clearness. Unless I stick strictly to what can be inferred by ordinary constructions with the suffix -ness, I cannot say anything more on clearness unless I defined it. That's why the sentence: "the fact that we don't know the meaning of the terms cannot be the rule by which we measure clearness" is not meaningless; we can't do anything here with it but to say that means the same as "the fact that we don't know the meaning of the terms cannot be the rule by which we measure grammatical correction"; and consequently see both the platitude it expresses and the fact that the process is reliable, for through the same undergo we can only find that correction is the state of being correct. I suppose of course, that we all known grammatically correct sentences. In this way, you can also see that clearness is not a range of nuances and hues, is an either/or property. A sentence perhaps can be more friendly or not, but it cannot be more or less clear.

*The only evidence I can give to support this is the fact that we mostly write obscure sentences when we misuse words by placing or declining them in wrong ways. The same goes for a sentence for which we know the meaning of its terms and yet doesn't makes sense: we're interpreting one of those terms as if it belonged to another grammatical category.
** A meaningless sentence is not, of course, obscure in its meaning. Unclear is not devoid of meaning. As a lot of rhetorical figures show, a grammatically incorrect sentence can have meaning.

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