ass

By Steven Pinker (Rebecca Goldstein) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

File: 1479807861667.jpg (904KB, 2250x2724px) Image search: [Google]

904KB, 2250x2724px

230px

>>4962732
17kb

Steve.

“Writers use hedges in the vain hope that it will get them off the hook,
or at least allow them to plead guilty to a lesser charge, should a critic
ever try to prove them wrong. A classic writer, in contrast, counts on
the common sense and ordinary charity of his readers, just as in
everyday conversation we know when a speaker means in general or
all else being equal. If someone tells you that Liz wants to move out of
Seattle because it’s a rainy city, you don’t interpret him as claiming
that it rains there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just because he
didn’t qualify his statement with relatively rainy or somewhat rainy.
Any adversary who is intellectually unscrupulous enough to give the
least charitable reading to an unhedged statement will find an
opening to attack the writer in a thicket of hedged ones anyway.”

—Steven Pinker, September 2014

>>4962750
Steven Pinker = S. Phincter