Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Watery prose

In reading various economic/political/rationalist/social articles about the California drought, I came across this very satisfying text:
These problems stem from the physical properties of the stuff. The amount of water you need to irrigate a field is big and heavy; it’s slippery — to hold it we need special containers (like reservoirs); it’s always moving, and mixing, and splitting into pieces, so it’s hard to tell whose is whose; it unpredictably falls out of the sky, and has no respect for property lines; if you drop it, it disappears into the ground. Because water is liquid in the physical sense, it is not at all liquid in the financial sense. [grist.org]
Sentences like these make me glad I live in a literate era.


This post's theme words come together: recondite, "concerned with a profound, difficult, or esoteric subject; little known, obscure" and perspicuous, "clearly expressed, easy to understand." The perspicacious prose clarified all confusion on the recondite relevancies.

No comments: