This seems like a solid improvement over X!Y notation. X!Y seems to not fit my brain in the same way that XのY seems to not fit my brain, and mentally substituting “’s” for “の” helps only partially.
Does it do enough good to be worth using despite the considerable hit to weirdness points? That I don’t know.
A better question, I think, would be this: “When is it worth it to use this one weird trick to boost the clarity of a work?”
It seems worth it in nerdy circles (i.e. among people who’re already familiar with subscripting) for passages that are dense with jumping around in time as in your chosen example, but I’d expect these sorts of passages to be rare, regardless of the expected readership.
Also, it’s unclear why “on Facebook” deserves to be compressed into an evidential. At the very least, “FB” isn’t immediately obvious what it refers to, whereas a date is easier to figure out from context.
It seems worth it in nerdy circles (i.e. among people who’re already familiar with subscripting) for passages that are dense with jumping around in time as in your chosen example, but I’d expect these sorts of passages to be rare, regardless of the expected readership.
But if passages aren’t dense with that or other uses, then you wouldn’t need to use subscripting much, by definition....
Perhaps you meant, “assuming that it remains a unique convention, most readers will have to pay a one-time cost of comprehension/dislike as overhead, and only then can gain from it; so you’ll need them to read a lot of it to pay off, and such passages may be quite rare”? Definitely a problem. A bit less of one if I were to start using it systematically, though, since I could assume that many readers will have read one of my other writings using the convention and had already paid the price.
Also, it’s unclear why “on Facebook” deserves to be compressed into an evidential.
Because it brings out the contrast: one is based on first-hand experience & observation, and the other is later socially-performative kvetching for an audience such as family or female acquaintances. The medium is the message, in this case.
At the very least, “FB” isn’t immediately obvious what it refers to, whereas a date is easier to figure out from context.
I waffled on whether to make it ‘FB’ or ‘Facebook’. I thought “FB” as an abbreviation was sufficiently widely known at this point to make it natural. But maybe not, if even LWers are thrown by it.
But if passages aren’t dense with that or other uses, then you wouldn’t need to use subscripting much, by definition....
Agreed.
Perhaps you meant, “assuming that it remains a unique convention, most readers will have to pay a one-time cost of comprehension/dislike as overhead, and only then can gain from it[…]
Agreed so far…
[…] so you’ll need them to read a lot of it to pay off, and such passages may be quite rare”?
You’ll need a bunch in a single passage. If you don’t need to disambiguate a large hairball of differently-timed people (like in My Best and Worst Mistake), then you probably shouldn’t bother in general. Put another way, you’re going to want to have a dense, if localized, cluster of people-times that need disambiguating for this to be a better idea than using parentheticals.
Because it brings out the contrast: one is based on first-hand experience & observation, and the other is later socially-performative kvetching for an audience such as family or female acquaintances. The medium is the message, in this case.
I’m struggling to see how this is an improvement over “on FB” or “on Facebook” for either the reader or the writer, assuming you don’t want to bury-but-still-mention the medium/audience.
I waffled on whether to make it ‘FB’ or ‘Facebook’. I thought “FB” as an abbreviation was sufficiently widely known at this point to make it natural. But maybe not, if even LWers are thrown by it.
Not without context or some other way to reduce the universe of things “FB” might refer to. “My wife complained on FB” is probably enough of a determiner most of the time for most people (unless I’m really underslept), but an “FB” subscript isn’t immediately obvious to people who aren’t used to that sort of thing.
You’ll need a bunch in a single passage. If you don’t need to disambiguate a large hairball of differently-timed people (like in My Best and Worst Mistake), then you probably shouldn’t bother in general.
Would you say that about citations? “Oh, you only use one source in this paragraph, so just omit the author/year/title. The reader can probably figure it out from mentions elsewhere if they really need to anyway.” That the use of subscripts is particularly clear when you have a hairball of references (in an example constructed to show benefits) doesn’t mean solitary uses are useless.
I’m struggling to see how this is an improvement over “on FB” or “on Facebook” for either the reader or the writer, assuming you don’t want to bury-but-still-mention the medium/audience.
It’s a matter of emphasis. Yes, you can write it out longhand, much as you can write out any equation or number long hand as not 22230 but “twenty-two divided by two-hundred-and-thirty” if necessary. Natural language is Turing-complete, so to speak: anything you do in a typographic way or a DSL like equations can be done as English (and of course, prior to the invention of various notations, people did write out equations like that, as painful as it is trying to imagine doing algebra while writing everything out without the benefit of even equal-signs). But you usually shouldn’t.
Is the mention of being Facebook in that example so important it must be called out like that? I didn’t think so. It seemed like the kind of snark a husband might make in passing. Writing it out feels like ‘explaining the joke’. Snark doesn’t work if you need to surround it in flashing neon lights with arrows pointing inward saying “I am being sarcastic and cynical and ironic here”. You can modify the example in your head to something which puts less emphasis on Facebook, if you feel strongly about it.
This seems like a solid improvement over X!Y notation. X!Y seems to not fit my brain in the same way that XのY seems to not fit my brain, and mentally substituting “’s” for “の” helps only partially.
A better question, I think, would be this: “When is it worth it to use this one weird trick to boost the clarity of a work?”
It seems worth it in nerdy circles (i.e. among people who’re already familiar with subscripting) for passages that are dense with jumping around in time as in your chosen example, but I’d expect these sorts of passages to be rare, regardless of the expected readership.
Also, it’s unclear why “on Facebook” deserves to be compressed into an evidential. At the very least, “FB” isn’t immediately obvious what it refers to, whereas a date is easier to figure out from context.
But if passages aren’t dense with that or other uses, then you wouldn’t need to use subscripting much, by definition....
Perhaps you meant, “assuming that it remains a unique convention, most readers will have to pay a one-time cost of comprehension/dislike as overhead, and only then can gain from it; so you’ll need them to read a lot of it to pay off, and such passages may be quite rare”? Definitely a problem. A bit less of one if I were to start using it systematically, though, since I could assume that many readers will have read one of my other writings using the convention and had already paid the price.
Because it brings out the contrast: one is based on first-hand experience & observation, and the other is later socially-performative kvetching for an audience such as family or female acquaintances. The medium is the message, in this case.
I waffled on whether to make it ‘FB’ or ‘Facebook’. I thought “FB” as an abbreviation was sufficiently widely known at this point to make it natural. But maybe not, if even LWers are thrown by it.
Agreed.
Agreed so far…
You’ll need a bunch in a single passage. If you don’t need to disambiguate a large hairball of differently-timed people (like in My Best and Worst Mistake), then you probably shouldn’t bother in general. Put another way, you’re going to want to have a dense, if localized, cluster of people-times that need disambiguating for this to be a better idea than using parentheticals.
I’m struggling to see how this is an improvement over “on FB” or “on Facebook” for either the reader or the writer, assuming you don’t want to bury-but-still-mention the medium/audience.
Not without context or some other way to reduce the universe of things “FB” might refer to. “My wife complained on FB” is probably enough of a determiner most of the time for most people (unless I’m really underslept), but an “FB” subscript isn’t immediately obvious to people who aren’t used to that sort of thing.
Would you say that about citations? “Oh, you only use one source in this paragraph, so just omit the author/year/title. The reader can probably figure it out from mentions elsewhere if they really need to anyway.” That the use of subscripts is particularly clear when you have a hairball of references (in an example constructed to show benefits) doesn’t mean solitary uses are useless.
It’s a matter of emphasis. Yes, you can write it out longhand, much as you can write out any equation or number long hand as not 22230 but “twenty-two divided by two-hundred-and-thirty” if necessary. Natural language is Turing-complete, so to speak: anything you do in a typographic way or a DSL like equations can be done as English (and of course, prior to the invention of various notations, people did write out equations like that, as painful as it is trying to imagine doing algebra while writing everything out without the benefit of even equal-signs). But you usually shouldn’t.
Is the mention of being Facebook in that example so important it must be called out like that? I didn’t think so. It seemed like the kind of snark a husband might make in passing. Writing it out feels like ‘explaining the joke’. Snark doesn’t work if you need to surround it in flashing neon lights with arrows pointing inward saying “I am being sarcastic and cynical and ironic here”. You can modify the example in your head to something which puts less emphasis on Facebook, if you feel strongly about it.