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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3097 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 16, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How would you maximize for annoyingness as a writer without revealing intent.

My proposal is to get idioms and phrases 'wrong' without compromising the meaning. Instead of using "apples and oranges" use "bananas and mangoes". "Its a cat eat cat world". "The earliest rabbit gets the carrot".

Maximize weirdness with no loss of weirdness points, is that even possible?

A full length text written in garden path sentences would be both impressive and infuriating.

Please explain.

I presume it's a bit of a linguistics joke. German is a head-final language, and if you're more used to a head-initial language like English, German sentences come off as having a "waiting for the resolution" effect that doesn't usually happen as often in English. German sentences can easily generate a garden-path effect just by choosing an unexpected primary verb. If you're fluent in both, but started with German fluency, I imagine the effect is less noticeable.

That's probably the case. Thanks for explaining!

It might depend who you are trying to annoy. I think I'd find that kind of charming, honestly.

On the other hand, if you were to, say, use "phased" instead of "fazed" ... ooh, how about using "could care less" in one place and "couldn't care less" in another place? That should catch everybody.

I'm thinking an otherwise well written text both syntactically and semantically but with wrong idioms would throw some people for a loop. But it might to be a bit jarring, I suppose mixing up wrong and correct versions of the same idiot will keep them guessing further.

While I could care less, I think using commonly misunderstood idioms would work best for all intensive purposes.

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