PERSPICUOUS.

Royal Safari (made by Messa, 1980s)

Transcribed below. This Royal Safari is entirely different from yesterday’s, which was one of the last Royal typewriters made in the United States; this one was made in the 1980s by the Messa factory in Portugal.

On the Perspicuity of Certain Terminology.

You may say that your writing is lucid, and so it may be.
But as soon as you say it’s perspicuous, we disagree.

Comments

  1. Charles Louis de Secondcat, baron de La Brèede et de Montesmiaou says:

    Oliver Ellsworth (allegedly): “Some persons never attain to the happy art of perspicuous expression…”

    Good for them.

    I appear to have mislearned the meaning of “perspicuous” based on context — before today, I would told you it meant something like “perceptive or insightful in a scholarly and detailed manner.”

    Before judging me, YOU read the following quote and tell me if my definition does not make slightly more sense:

    “I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous; and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to be perspicuous, some obscurity may still appear to remain upon a subject, in its own nature extremely abstracted.”
    — Adam Smith*

    * (Again allegedly, these internet quote sites are never the most reliable, and I do not have a copy of Smith at hand to confirm. But I somewhat doubt they made this one up wholesale.)

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