Blah Blah Blah

"Blah blah blah" is a nonsense term that people use to refer to an inconsistent long sequence of words, as when your mother, wife, husband, or manager speaks and speaks, and...speaks.

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I realize that some, maybe even most, of the folks here will react to this as nonsense (BlahBlahBlah!). But ask yourself; to what degree are you really better at communicating ideas, versus just being more proficient with manipulating language in a (self-)satisfying way? I would paraphrase the EinsteinPrinciple as something like "You should write your thought as simply as possible, but no simpler..." I think many of us discuss various concepts as if they were simple, but when you dig into them and put them in the context of other concepts, and the real world in general, they aren't simple any longer...

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. (*)

(the un-obfuscated original) I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all. (OrwellsParody of the BookOfEcclesiastes 9:11)

Think more, write less.

-- SteveHowell

Concision is easier said than done, requiring TimeToMakeItShort.

-- KeithEdwards

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(*) The example above is from GeorgeOrwell's essay Politics and the English Language. He wanted to illustrate how much less effectively airy polysyllabic Graeco-Latin abstractions convey ideas than do good stout English words, even when the subject under discussion is an abstract one (the random unfairness of life).

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See: YaddaYaddaYadda, GingerFactor

CategoryIdiom