BF2S Forums EE Chats 2142

that whole part in bleak house was a yugely descriptive clump of text. the paragraphs pop with visuals not just telling you that it was foggy and muddy and wet, but HOW. paragraphs to call something muddy and foggy (never mind social commentary).

this is woeful. i feel bad for her for not being able to appreciate it. if she struggled with that, i'm sure parts of even 'arry pottuh would go over her head.

to be fair, literature is presented in (american) public schools as drudgery, not a joy. in my experience, no love of reading, or how to parse some of this stuff, was taught beyond third grade. you were pretty much tossed a book and then you're on your own. feels criminal.

(not to infantilise, but) maybe they should've let her read it on an oversized ipad. might've jogged some cognitive functions.

otoh, i'd like to see PrEsIdEnT trump try and parse dickens. guess you don't have to read when you're us president lmao.

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2025-05-22 00:06:34)

honestly, 6-8th grade level stuff is beyond the ken of a lot of american adults.



e: not just in reading, but math too (and more). i've told the story.

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2025-05-22 00:09:09)

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

No they really haven't, mostly they've quietly got on with the lives creating a more advanced world and being well rewarded for it.

i've been in college for stem stuff, and actually, they really have. stem-chauvinism is certainly a thing. maybe there's a blind spot for it if you agree with the sentiment.

it was at all levels from student to staff and even the mood outside of campus ("bet you're glad you're taking this and not literature, huh?") and in media.

Excellent, the worm has finally turned, muahahahahahaha

In my time it was the humanities nerds who were overbearingly obnoxious.
"Oh, you're doing engineering, well maybe if I need the spark plugs on my Jaguar checked when I get one I'll give you a call hur hur hur hur hur
Oh and could you give me a lift to the bus stop? I need to go to the station, which reminds me, my railcard has expired so the tickets going to be twice as much, could you lend me ten quid?"

Fast forward to graduation, the STEM people had jobs lined up, in engineering companies or the city.
"Yeah, I'm going to take a bit of a break you know, then a friend of a friend needs some help with his pub, lots of networking opportunities, then maybe I'll do some travelling"

Fast forward a decade
"Yeah its been a blast you know, so many contacts, not working currently, but the wife is, on the cheese counter, who doesn't like cheese!, writing a book about the post box in my village, I've done the research and it was originally green! Obviously I'm not expecting it to be a best seller but sometimes these things gain momentum. Oh and sculptures obviously, I'm a bit skint now, could you lend me ten quid?"

how many times have we seen the disaster movie where some clownishly brilliant polymath stem engineer/"professional scientist" gets ignored by a bunch of "stuck-up" (every accusation) liberal arts people and then the (unstoppable, anyway) disaster strikes, and they come back to the scientist on their knees to magically solve it. maybe that's commentary on ignoring climate science, but really weird (or at least pandering) stuff from hollywood if you think about it. also, the pull together a crew of Men Who Get Their Hands Dirty bit. lmao

Thats literally the whole history of the world, arts nerds fuck things up and they have to beg a STEM mega-brain technocrat to save them.

"do stem," the constant, incessant drum, forgetting that society's wheels are greased by more than plumbers, electricians, or aerospace engineers.

Sure, the pendulum seems to have swung back in favour of STEM and its not the be all and end all.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2025-05-22 03:26:03)

Dilbert_X wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

No they really haven't, mostly they've quietly got on with the lives creating a more advanced world and being well rewarded for it.

i've been in college for stem stuff, and actually, they really have. stem-chauvinism is certainly a thing. maybe there's a blind spot for it if you agree with the sentiment.

it was at all levels from student to staff and even the mood outside of campus ("bet you're glad you're taking this and not literature, huh?") and in media.

Excellent, the worm has finally turned, muahahahahahaha

In my time it was the humanities nerds who were overbearingly obnoxious.
"Oh, you're doing engineering, well maybe if I need the spark plugs on my Jaguar checked when I get one I'll give you a call hur hur hur hur hur
Oh and could you give me a lift to the bus stop? I need to go to the station, which reminds me, my railcard has expired so the tickets going to be twice as much, could you lend me ten quid?"

Fast forward to graduation, the STEM people had jobs lined up, in engineering companies or the city.
"Yeah, I'm going to take a bit of a break you know, then a friend of a friend needs some help with his pub, lots of networking opportunities, then maybe I'll do some travelling"

Fast forward a decade
"Yeah its been a blast you know, so many contacts, not working currently, but the wife is, on the cheese counter, who doesn't like cheese!, writing a book about the post box in my village, I've done the research and it was originally green! Obviously I'm not expecting it to be a best seller but sometimes these things gain momentum. Oh and sculptures obviously, I'm a bit skint now, could you lend me ten quid?"

how many times have we seen the disaster movie where some clownishly brilliant polymath stem engineer/"professional scientist" gets ignored by a bunch of "stuck-up" (every accusation) liberal arts people and then the (unstoppable, anyway) disaster strikes, and they come back to the scientist on their knees to magically solve it. maybe that's commentary on ignoring climate science, but really weird (or at least pandering) stuff from hollywood if you think about it. also, the pull together a crew of Men Who Get Their Hands Dirty bit. lmao

Thats literally the whole history of the world, arts nerds fuck things up and they have to beg a STEM mega-brain technocrat to save them.

"do stem," the constant, incessant drum, forgetting that society's wheels are greased by more than plumbers, electricians, or aerospace engineers.

Sure, the pendulum seems to have swung back in favour of STEM and its not the be all and end all.

you just know this long rant is grounded in reality. dilbert went to imperial college, a sciences-only university. i'm sure he had lots of daily interactions with 'humanities students' in south kensington. the only other educational establishment in that part of town is the RCA, with a bunch of trainee architects with geometrical haircuts.



this is literally the inside of dilbert's head. hokey hollywood scripts, probably replete with bad accents.

Last edited by uziq (2025-05-22 05:53:43)

Trying to get inside the head of a long-(and in the case of Dickens thankfully)dead  author is a largely useless and archaic skill, sorry.

Yes there is metaphor etc but page after page of turgid prose taking it well past the extreme is not big or clever, its tedious.

useless and archaic skill to be able to read ordinary prose written in the 19th century?

do you not think, say, lawyers/barristers might benefit from being able to read something written more than 20 years ago?

what's wrong with developing reading comprehension for other idioms, periods, or argots, anyway? people learn to write and speak a certain way in the office, don't they? people write in formalese when writing essays or reports. what's wrong with an archaic register? god forbid the idea of actually learning another language entirely, if english written before 1950 flummoxes you.

is reading shakespeare pointless because it's old and contains lots of archaisms? forsooth!

i really pity you. you lead a very crabbed life if you're not prepared to read anything beyond your ken. (and it's not about dickens and his particular style or plot-heavy victorian plodders; i really couldn't care less about dickens.)

Last edited by uziq (2025-05-22 09:41:40)

uziq wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I assume the same thing happened with a lot of Boomers in regards to their kids. Pushing millennials and Gen Z into college was probably in large part so that they can get the college experience that many Boomers saw but were denied in their time.

boomers and gen-X (i.e. parents today) had the best college experience of any generation(s). much widened access to higher-education, extremely fluid social mobility, lots of government largess and funding due to high levels of state centralisation and spend following WW2, etc. almost zero in the way of student loans, and plenty of returning/demobbed servicemen getting into top schools with a full-ride from uncle sam.

really, nobody (from ordinary stock, anyway; clearly the WASP brahmins had their inter-generational ivy legacies) had a better shot at living out the platonic ideal at a college campus. what do you think the whole 1960s were about, exactly?

Newbie would probably interject at this point to remind you that not every boomer was part of the post-World War 2 economic prosperity. This point in time is probably the start of the white working class resentment we have to live with. A lot of them wanted the experience for their kids. Many others wanted it to end for everyone.

newbie would interject to say that even boomers from poor families were going to college. you could conceivably maintain that shit with a part-time job. boomers are a constant subject of mockery in terms of out-of-touch people who sold younger generations on how far a bit of elbow grease could get you with whatever company. apparently, it can get some people into a cardboard box these days. take a raise for an extra $0.50 an hour with 3x the responsibilities and 10x the stress! work ethic!

#notall

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

useless and archaic skill to be able to read ordinary prose written in the 19th century?

Fairly useless yes.

I get that writing should be varied, have depth etc, on the other hand you haven't even said who the person who can't 'make the leap to figurative language' is.

on the other hand? that's a college-level student, it literally says it on the image. maybe improve your reading skills a bit?

for a person so interested in biblical verse about the amaleks, i'm surprised you struggle with the solid fibrous meal of 19th century prose. one of our leading textual scholars on bf2s is ... impatient with metaphors? i'm surprised!

it's from an article in a higher-education journal. it's literally about college-age students who can't cope with figurative language.

i was reading dickens at 12 or 13, pretty well when anyone should be nudged onto that sort of literature.

the decline in literacy has been precipitous, and it's not a good thing.

you bring every single issue down to your personal grievances. you've mentioned repeatedly your 'trauma' at being made to read boring literature in school – what? – all of forty years ago? nobody cares that you had a bad teacher and didn't enjoy slogging through 'a tale of two cities'. grow up man. flinching from reading fiction for your whole life because of poor pedagogy in 1970 is truly fucking pathetic.

erm, well, saying 'good, metaphors are pointless frippery anyway; i was terrorised by one myself, in 1977 ...' doesn't seem like a sane or well-adjusted response to me to widespread illiteracy.

i think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that a populace who glaze over at the sight of a paragraph of text is going to be one infinitely supple to manipulation and demagoguery. being able to read and think figuratively is quite important, actually. being able to construct and deconstruct analogies is very much the 'rotating a 3D shape in your brain' of humanities-based courses.

nobody is 'deconstructing' dickens by being asked to parse a sentence for its meaning. that's not what deconstruction means. please stop using fancy terms that you don't know anything about. being presented with a passage and being asked 'what does it say?' is not deconstruction, dipshit. that's called reading. a pretty important skill, actually!

analogies are a tediously overemphasized part of writing? what? you would know, from all those composition classes and creative writing seminars you've taken, i assume?

analogies are absolutely crucial to higher-level physics and maths. it's really funny to me the insanely ignorant and philistine things you say 'because muh STEM degree', things which would alienate any real scientist.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.10 … 90688-7_10

Last edited by uziq (2025-05-23 09:19:38)