Dear Wiley / Golias
Thank you taking up my invitation to explain "Golias’ Razor". Having initiated the thread, I feel I ought to throw in my own three ha’p’orth.
The injunction that modifiers (in this context, single-word adjectives and adverbs) should pull their weight is sound advice for all of us. Golias’ Razor offers a way of quantifying this advice and thereby helping us, as readers and writers, to focus more sharply on the issue. As you make clear, setting the value at 3:1 expresses a critical choice. Though other choices and other values are possible, this does not, in my view, make the Razor less instructive. Rather, it encourages to think, always a good thing.
Maz’s question about French verse is interesting and opens up a wider topic. Roger put it like this: "Words have to come one at a time, of course, and my perception isn't ‘delayed’ but ordered by the poet". I take it that the process of reading (and of listening to) an utterance is one in which the reader (the listener) is constantly guessing from verbal and other clues what will come next and of revising his guess in the light of what actually follows. This process of expectation modified by continuously deferred fulfilment (it is tempting to eroticize the process) is powerfully influenced by word-function and by the dynamics of syntax. Languages vary in the degree to which they require us to postpone what I have just called fulfilment. Of the languages I am familiar with, Latin and German make the greatest demands of this kind - that is, on someone for whom these are not first languages and for whom, therefore, by comparison with English, there is always a residual strangeness involved. I suspect, however, that it would be unwise to assume that a Roman or a German experienced things in the same way. To attribute critical value to the fact that adjectives tend to follow nouns in French seems, therefore, to merit closer thought.
To return to Roger’s remark, I suppose I differ from you in this, that I am not convinced that the writer’s task is simply to move the reader forward without anything which might be "obstructive" or which might create "delaying effects". It is, rather, the task of managing the reader’s attention while at the same time allowing "space" for the intelligent imagination to expand into. Of course, since readers come in all shapes and sizes, this is not easy; but then if it were, it would not be fun either.
Thank you once again for describing for us how your most useful Razor works.
Best wishes!
Clive Watkins
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