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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

It forces people to not write a complex English sentence, is what it does. You literally can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting. Which is annoying.

There's concision, and then there's nuking the concept of the paragraph.

I for one welcome our new longer-Tweet overlords.

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The length of your entire message: 285 chars

Length of "You can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting": 56 chars (took "literally" out, because that's incorrect).

Is that "you can't", or "you can't"?

It's "one can't".

Yes, thank you for the char-counting. I'm aware that my comment was not the height of profundity, nor was it particularly long. However, I do occasionally post more interesting things, and some of them need to be longer, because they discuss a complex issue or cite many facts. My comment was not intended to, in itself, justify the need for a longer Tweet length.

http://reddit.com/r/iamverysmart

>"You can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting"

This is not a complex thought.

Which doesn't make it wrong.

This response tactic is tedious every time it comes up. "Tweets r 2 short" is never a valid complaint unless the limit is below 16 characters?

This is a non argument. Dismissing an argument out of hand as invalid because you say so adds nothing to the discussion. Feel free to expand that to an actual argument

All I'm saying is that the tired "count the characters of the comment that says tweets are too short to contain a complex thought and point out that it fits within a tweet" method of argumentation doesn't prove anything except an ability to count.

ok got it

I guess the 16 character notion is a classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Not exactly a non argument.

"Literally" is not incorrect.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

"Literally" can mean "virtually," or "figuratively."

Yes and this is unfortunate but modern.

Define "modern." It has been in common use for at least two centuries.

Only if you'd assume the fallacy that an enunciation could ever be "literal" in its meaning. I'd argue this actually points at a structural undecidability which is essential to language.

From your link: "Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposite of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary."

Seems literally incorrect to me.

We need a new word that non-figuratively means "literally", then.

I propose "figuratively".

Sorry to reply to my own post. It bothered me that I literally knew no good substitute in English for "literally". Did some research, and the best that I found is the phrase "without exaggeration", which actually seems usable to me and might be more likely to be understood than "literally" is today.

"I got literally hundreds of bug reports today" may not be appreciated correctly (a listener who doesn't know me might think that I got 12 and I'm just whining), but "Speaking without exaggeration, I got hundreds of bug reports today" seems airtight.

Or maybe it's time to import >>wörtlich<< into English.

You don't need to throw out a word just because it's become an autoantonym[1]; many words are. To cleave; to hew; to screen; etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

My favorite: "oversight".

nice, so it literally means its opposite as well.

This sort of usage destroys the entire word. If one word has two opposing meanings it's ambiguous to ever use it at all. Language rot via imprecision.

I guess there is a subtle joke in using "literally" in a context where it's about the actual amount of letters.

You can express complex thought in short equations (and in fact it is often preferable), so why would it be the case that it couldn't be expressed in just 140 characters? It doesn't make sense.

Short equations don't express complex thoughts. They express the short result of complex proofs, which are themselves essentially definitions. Math is a process of describing reality using definitions built on definitions. The analogy to communicating social, political, or creative thoughts is ridiculous.

If you want to prove me wrong, show me a complex thought expressed in 140 characters. Again, I agree that complex thought can result in a very interesting tweet, but the tweet will not be able to convey all the thought behind it.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

My response in 136 characters:

That thought is pseudo-profound, not complex. In this context, "sound" is human-audible air vibration. One waving hand doesn't make any.

If nothing else, I inspired one. Well said! I appreciate that response.

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