Class.forName().newInstance() vs new

[blmblm]

On Mon, 20 Jun 2011, Arved Sandstrom wrote:

On 11-06-20 04:19 PM, (e-mail address removed) wrote:
[ SNIP ]

The best measure of this detailed design document that I
produced is that, in marked contrast to the usual design docs
that floated around that office, the higher up the food chain
you went with it, the less people were able to understand it.

"Less" or "fewer"? (You probably do mean "less", but the
widespread practice of using the former to mean the latter means
that one can't really be sure, maybe.)

I did mean less, but by definition you also would have had fewer
people able to understand it.

This less/fewer thing is largely dubious:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/495/less-vs-fewer/505#505

I don't think it's defensible to say that Arved's sentence was
incorrect. Lots of people might not write it that way, but lots
would, and everyone understands it.

Just for the record, I don't think I meant to claim that there
was anything wrong with Arved's sentence, even to those pedantic
prescriptivists who disapprove of using "less" where "fewer" would
work. I think there might be a subtle distinction between fewer
people who understand, and people in general understanding less,
but -- maybe not.

Agreed.

I don't think that really works -- "the higher up" seems to me to
want a parallel "the" before whatever follows the comma.

I read "less" as an adverb modifying "able", moved to enhance
parallelism: "The higher ... the less able ..."

I think you may be making the same point here I was getting at just
above ....

 

[Michael Wojcik]

I read "less" as an adverb modifying "able", moved to enhance
parallelism: "The higher ... the less able ..."

Combine that idea with Arved's. "the [quantifier] ... the [quantifier]
...." is one of a set of idiomatic phrasal constructions acting as a
pair of parallel adverbs, typically modifying an adjective following
the second quantifier.

The idiomatic phrase "the [quantifier]" can serve as an adverb on its
own, too, as in "none the less".

 

[Michael Wojcik]

Just for the record, I don't think I meant to claim that there
was anything wrong with Arved's sentence, even to those pedantic
prescriptivists who disapprove of using "less" where "fewer" would
work. I think there might be a subtle distinction between fewer
people who understand, and people in general understanding less,
but -- maybe not.

There's definitely a distinction between those two concepts. It's just
not definitively captured by the use of "less" in that sentence, which
could be interpreted as either without straining normal meanings of
the words involved.

However, convention suggests that "the less" in that sentence is the
adverbial "the less", and not part of a noun phrase "the less people"
meaning not as many people.

This is one place where, for clarity, it would be useful to use
"fewer" *if* that was what the author wanted to convey. (In this case
it wasn't.) As Arved said elsethread, however, you'd have to do some
editing to arrive at a palatable construction using "fewer". One
option would be "the higher you went ... the fewer the people who were
able ...".

 

[Michael Wojcik]

Someone should perhaps mention, in this context, George Orwell's essay
"Politics and the English Language" [*]? one of my favorites, which
seems to make a similar connection between language and ethics.

Yes. A number of authors and poets at the time - coming out of the
Modernist avant-garde period, High Literary Modernism, and the world
wars - were both very interested in language and very concerned with
its political ramifications. Besides Orwell you have for example
Anthony Burgess and Aldous Huxley.

The idea that language had political effectivity was rather in the air
at the time, fed by psychoanalysis; structural linguistics
anthropological theories like the (somewhat misnamed) "Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis"; discussions about art, propaganda, and culture among
international Marxists; the work of philosophers such as Heidegger;
and so on.

But Orwell's is a particularly good example in this area. It's
certainly a lot more readable than many of the contemporary
philosophical treatments. (I like Derrida just fine, but few people
would call _Spectres of Marx_, say, a light read.)