Let's hurl a brick-y mart....

I struggle with this at work a lot. My manager often tries to push me for a simpler explanation, but unfortunately I can only simplify things so much before they start being wrong in a lot of situations

You don't need an extra document to define each term as it is expected that others in the field will understand the language used.

For lawyers, it's the opposite, actually. Lawyers are overly cautious and choose to explicitly define terms themselves, all the time. If they can reference a definition already in a specific law, great. But they'll go ahead and explicitly make that link, instead of relying on the reader to assume they know which law to look up.

So any serious contract tends to use pages and pages of definitions at the beginning.

Imagine programmers being reluctant to use other people's libraries, but using the same function and variable names with slightly different actual meanings/purposes depending on the program. That's what legal drafting is like.

I'm not sure but I think that comment might be clever satire

See how desensitized I am to that, electroencephalography. Electro- electronic, encephalo- head, graph- record, electronic head record, those wavy lines from the brain.

It's when you put electrodes on someone's head and measure the electricity on the surface of their brain.

The law falls back to a bunch of hidden rules if the language isn't explicit.

"No vehicles in the park" is a simple rule, but then poses problems when you have to ask whether that includes baby strollers, regular bicycles, or electric assist bicycles, whether there's an exception for ambulances in an emergency, etc.

Somewhat famously, there was a case a decade or so ago where someone was prosecuted under Sarbanes Oxley's obstruction of justice provisions, passed to criminalize Enron-like accounting coverups. The guy was convicted for tossing undersized fish overboard to avoid prosecution for violating fish and wildlife rules. The statute made it a crime for anyone who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence” a federal investigation. So the Supreme Court had to figure out whether a fish is a "tangible object" in the meaning of the law, when it is clearly a "tangible object" within the normal meaning of the term, but not the type of object that stores records, as everything else described in the criminal statute.

So that just means, in the end, simplicity of language can betray complexity of meaning underneath. Lawyers tend to prefer to make things clear up front so that there's no uncertainty later on, and that just leads to unreasonably complicated language.

Variables can be in arbitrary units. If you put the units through the same steps as the values, you'll end up with the right unit, plus you need the values to be in compatible units for the operations to even make sense. At least as long as any constants are also given the correct units. This can also help discover cases where you accidentally mix similar but different units (like litres and gallons).

I also find it very satisfying to do those equations on the units, adding ones that get multiplied in and cancelling ones that get divided out, and then ending up with a unit that makes sense, given what the equation was supposed to express.

Though we might be saying the same thing, because while I don't think variables need units, expanding that variable with a value absolutely should involve a unit, as should any examples of that equation's use.

Edit: an example to show what I mean:

If you have a table that is 1.5m long and know that you want at least 2 feet between the wall and the table on each side so that people can get in and out if chairs comfortably, you'd have 1.5m + 2*2ft as the equation, but you can't add an m to a ', so you need to multiply one of them by a conversion factor:

1.5m + 2 * 0.3048m/ft * 2ft

The ft terms cancel out and you're left with

1.5m + 2 * 0.3048m * 2

= 1.5m + 1.2192m

~= 2.72m

So your space must be at least 2.72m to fit that table and chairs comfortably (by the above definition of comfort, at least).

Funny enough, this use of units helped me avoid a mistake in this example because I had the ft/m conversion initially but saw that would result in trying to add m to ft² so it was obvious that I had made a mistake. Otherwise I might have looked like an idiot trying to say that a 1.5m table with 4 feet of buffer space requires a room over 12m long.

I didn't see the capitalism bad part, but I agree, I also think we should seize the means of production and crush the bourgeoisie.

Sure there is a difference. The comment I was replying to was talking about making text accessible to outsiders though. Even just talking about plain English is a bit problematic though - the problem is that a whole bunch of technical disciplines are jargon heavy and not easily amenable to straightforward plain English. If you’re talking about things like general flowery prose, it essentially doesn’t exist in the hard sciences - at least that I’ve seen.

Maybe the humanities are different, but I sometimes wonder if the humanities are under more scrutiny because they deal with topics laypeople reckon they have a good intuitive grasp on. I actually had an interesting time at a party recently watching a sociology grad student working on the Scottish criminal justice system politely nod as a young English woman lectured her on the topic purely based on whatever half digested stereotypes she’d picked up in her 30-odd years.