Keep It Simple, Stupid

I haven’t visited my “getting old” label for a while although, as nearly as I can tell, I have continued to get old at the same rate as before. I have given a fair amount of time to Erik Erikson’s The Life Cycle Completed and I want to pick up a part of that. On the other side of my brain, I have been working with B. F. Skinner’s Enjoy Old Age: A Practical Guide. Two more different approaches can hardly be imagined and I like them both.

Tonight’s blog comes from that background. I was reading Skinner a few days ago and came upon a passage I am eager to share. This comes from a section called “Forgetting How to Say Things” in Chapter 4, “Keeping In Touch With the Past—Remembering.”

The problem he is working with is that old people, when speaking, digress and lose their way. Skinner’s solution is to stop digressing. That way, you won’t have to remember what you were trying to say. Here’s the passage that so tickled me.

Something of this sort is especially likely to happen—at any age—when you are speaking a language you do not speak well. Then it is always a mistake to embark upon a complex sentence; you do much better with simple sentences. And that is true in old age even when you are speaking your own language.

So what’s so funny about that? Well, Skinner’s sentence (…always a mistake to embark upon a complex sentence…) is a complex sentence. I think that Skinner and co-author M. E. Vaughn and Jean Fargo, who helped with the manuscript all skipped over that because they all knew what he meant. He meant that complicated sentences are likely to get you into trouble.

But he didn’t want to say “complicated,” because “complicated” is only a complicated form of “complex.” Except that it isn’t. Complex is, in fact, a term of art. It actually means something. It is the name of the kind of sentence Skinner has put together, with two independent clauses joined by a semicolon. “Complicated,” by contrast, is not a term of art. It means “not simple.”
Skinner’s prose is a pleasure to read. The font is large, for one thing. The sections are short. The sentences are simple. But it is his urge to simplify that drove him from “complicated” to “complex,” when I really should not have.

It isn’t a major point, as you have seen. But it is Saturday Evening and that is when I like to be sure to publish a post.