There’s a related problem; Humans have a tendency to once they have terms for something take for granted that something that looks at a glance to make rough syntactic sense that it actually has semantics behind it.
This sentence is so convoluted that at first I thought it was some kind of meta joke.
Well, the extra “that” before “that it actually” really doesn’t help matters. I’ve tried to make it slightly better but it still seems to be a bit convoluted.
There’s a related problem: Once they have terms for something, humans have a tendency to take for granted that anything that appears to make superficial syntactic sense actually has semantics behind it.
Or just use a bunch of commas?
There’s a related problem; Humans have a tendency, once they have terms for something, to take for granted that something that looks, at a glance, to make rough syntactic sense actually has semantics behind it.
I have nothing against splitting infinitives, but
“to once they have terms for something take for granted”
is pretty extreme. It’s likely to overflow the reader’s
stack.
After fixing that, running an iteration of the “omit needless words” algorithm,
and doing a bit of rephrasing, here’s what I came up with:
There’s a related problem:
If they have terms for something,
humans tend to
think things that make syntactic sense actually have semantics behind them.
(Ninja edit: Some more needless words omitted, including a
nominalization.)
(Edit 2: Here’s a better nominalization
link
because it gives examples of when to use nominalizations, not just when not to
use them.)
This sentence is so convoluted that at first I thought it was some kind of meta joke.
Well, the extra “that” before “that it actually” really doesn’t help matters. I’ve tried to make it slightly better but it still seems to be a bit convoluted.
Thiss?
Or just use a bunch of commas?
The punctuation, it’s beautiful!
I’m a little relieved to find that, when i first read the grandparent comment, i was able to parse it the same way as you have in your clarification.
Yes! So much better.
I have nothing against splitting infinitives, but “to once they have terms for something take for granted” is pretty extreme. It’s likely to overflow the reader’s stack. After fixing that, running an iteration of the “omit needless words” algorithm, and doing a bit of rephrasing, here’s what I came up with:
There’s a related problem: If they have terms for something, humans tend to think things that make syntactic sense actually have semantics behind them.
(Ninja edit: Some more needless words omitted, including a nominalization.)
(Edit 2: Here’s a better nominalization link because it gives examples of when to use nominalizations, not just when not to use them.)