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Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

Most people outside the UK, and a good portion inside, would not know:

- what Michaelmas is (it's a somewhat archaic Christian festival in September)

- what Michaelmas term is (and that it's specific to the upper courts of the UK, along with Hilary term, Easter term and Trinity term)

- where Lincoln's Inn or its hall is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%27s_Inn#Old_Hall)

- what an "inn" is in this context (i.e. the Inns of Court are not hostelries)

- what position the Lord Chancellor holds in UK law and politics

- that the name of the role derives from being head of the Court of Chancery (which at the time sat in Lincoln's Inn hall)

- what a chancery court does (it awards equitable reliefs)

- why such a court is needed (equitable remedies provide what legal remedies cannot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_remedy)

Did you know all of the above while reading the second sentence?

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I knew very little of this. I know about the Inns of Court, but I didn't know this was such an Inn; I know what a chancery court is (Delaware has them!) but similarly not that it applied in this case. I've no idea what Michaelmas is, but like Christmas, I assume it's an event and/or season which occurs periodically.

I could still read the text! And it's useful to read texts and understand 95%, or 80%, or even 50%! IMO "fully understand what you're reading" versus "can't understand what you're reading" is a harmfully discouraging dichotomy. You can often gloss over such things rather than struggle with them.

I just wanted to get across that there's more detail to be wrung out of even the first line. You don't need to get all nuances on first read, but they're there. Dickens was known for his observational detail, and also he'd spent a lot of time in London courts on account of his father so knew all these terms well.

You read the paragraph a lot better than most of the students being referenced by the GP (https://www.scribd.com/document/868947219/project-muse-92234...) but there was still more to be had.

Everyone has their own comfort level with reading, and we do just skim things we think unimportant... I often do that until suddenly the book stops making sense, and I have to go back some pages and re-read things which I'd skipped that were clearly important. Different authors have different densities of load-bearing words.

I think it's forgivable if you gloss over this first line and think it might be set in a hotel during a holiday, with some random high-ranking person, because the next 800 pages will make it pretty clear it's about a court. But I am worried that these students, hoping to get an degree in English, would rather guess what's being said, when they had the opportunity to look things up. An afternoon on Wikipedia would do them a world of good.

No of course not, nor did I need to to read the passage.

It sounds to me like you are you are overestimating the importance of all these trivial details - getting caught up in the minutia is exactly what might make this seem (falsely) inaccessible to people who don't really know how to read properly. You demand to know whether the reader can pick out the individual trees, when in reality they see the forest just fine.

I don't think you need to know any of that to be able to read and understand this passage. What you need to know is: There's a guy who's eating, and then we immediately break away for a lengthy description of the weather and the environment of the city - all of which is easily digestible without dicking about with trivial details of UK law and politics.

If you'd get tripped up by anything, I'd imagine it would be "it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus" given that 'wonderful' in this context means the precise opposite of the common usage today - literally, inspiring wonder - as this dinosaur would be an unremarkable sight, not inspiring wonder. There's all sorts of clever little twists and turns in word usage here, if you're worried about 'Michaelmas' or the etymology of the term 'Chancellor' then you've already lost the plot, imo.

Followup though because it’s too late for an edit - apparently the study authors disagree with me, and think that me not knowing what Michaelmas or chancery or that particular inn or what a lord chancellor is is actually all very important, and the fact that I just read through without stopping to carefully look up these details and understand them is actually a very bad sign. Apparently just brushing last details I don’t understand in the moment, assuming reading further will bring clarification, is somehow being bad at reading/understanding.

Weirdly judgey and makes me want to reread dickens in self defense here to find out what they think I might be missing.

LOL no. But I'm sure I would be just unable to read many online forum topics build on its own intimate subculture without as much clarification from insiders.

Court esoterism is just as blatantly bland in its behavior as in any other human group carrying nothing but prestige and a will to mystify outsiders. Elaborate vocabulary to fill the space around a void core. Much ado for nothing.

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