Weeknotes 2025-31

4 Aug 2025

A few excerpts & notes I jotted down, before Factorio came along and stole my mind.

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Reading

When I picked up On Writing Well by William Zinsser, I did not expect so many sharp words against corporations and politicians. It's cathartic, and I'm giggling every few pages.

Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes. When the Digital Equipment Corporation eliminated 3,000 jobs its statement didn't mention layoffs; those were "involuntary methodologies." When an Air Force missile crashed, it "impacted with the ground prematurely." When General Motors had a plant shutdown, that was a "volume-related production-schedule adjustment." Companies that go belly-up have "a negative cash-flow position."

Verbal camouflage reached new heights during General Alexander Haig's tenure as President Reagan's secretary of state. Before Haig nobody had thought of saying "at this juncture of maturization" to mean "now."

And then there's this gem on "journalese":

Notes that are fired off are always fired in anger and from a sitting position. What the weapon is I've never found out.

I did not know about journalese:¹

• Do you speak journalese?
• There is no ease in journalese
• Fluent in journalese
• Journalese is like a poker player’s tell: it shows when a story is flimsy

Oh no.²