"Many types of technical prose are also difficult for the casual reader.
There are these special vocabularies and uncommon concepts. Terms like
'cash flow', 'top-down', 'quantum states' may superficially sound
understandable, but to know their full meaning one needs to have had the
benefit of long study."
I fell asleep in the car travelling back from London last night. Reading
this, I feel like a character in an episode of The Outer Limits who wakes up
and finds he is in an insane parallel universe. The point is that we do not
need to know the full meaning of the terms quoted here in order for them to
be usable and intelligible. How many of the words we use every day do we
really know the full meaning of - whatever that is? The question is
unanswerable and it doesn't matter. Communication and intellgibility are
matters of degree. We do not need to know the recipe of the pudding and the
cooking method for it to be enjoyable. We do not need to know how an
internal combustion engine works in order to be good drivers. Anyone who has
ever tried to annotate a poem will have found that there are many things
that need explanation but which we gloss over with apparent ease when
reading as opposed to studying. It seems to me that in reading we decide
that a text either is or isn't understandable enough.
cheers
David
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