[fuzztester]

Nope.

Let's juxtapose them and see:

Von Moltke:

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."

Tyson:

"Everybody has a plan until you get hit in the face."

Pretty much the same meaning, and Von Moltke's quote is three words shorter, so no, Tyson's quote is not simpler.

Also, Tyson was ungrammatical, IMO:

"Everybody" vs. "you" in the same sentence, referring to the same entity.

Grammar experts, correct me if I am wrong.

[sbuk]

It was midnight and a few beers after celebrating a birthday. I'm sorry I offended your grammatical sensibilities. But you really did go full orange site there, didn't you! I will admit to misquoting Mike Tyson; "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.", which I hope goes someway to restoring peace and order over a tiny, drunken grammatical slip-up.

[fuzztester]

Oh, I wasn't offended at all. I am not one of these Oxford comma type of people (I think that was a trend on Twitter a while ago). I have no idea what that means, except maybe it is about grammatical correctness, and I am not going to google it. :)

I was just being a little pedantic for fun. I don't do that often.

So peace and order was not even disturbed, at least for me.

Enjoy.

[fuzztester]

BTW, looks like you could deploy my new SaaS at the end of your above comment, for great good:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37064183

[fuzztester]

BTW, what is "orange site"?

I googled it and at least the top few links don't seem relevant.

[rovolo]

This site's default theme is orange.

[fuzztester]

Thanks, but I knew that, and it does not seem to answer my question, unless I didn't get what you meant.

My question was in reply to the comment above by sbuk, excerpted below:

>It was midnight and a few beers after celebrating a birthday. I'm sorry I offended your grammatical sensibilities. But you really did go full orange site there, didn't you!

[rovolo]

This site is the “orange site”. The comment is saying that the gray text comment behaved like some people on this site behave; a behavior which people associate with this site. I think it can be described as overly nit-picky, but that’s an incomplete description.

[eru]

Simplicity isn't a function of number of words alone.

> Also, Tyson was ungrammatical, IMO:

> "Everybody" vs. "you" in the same sentence, referring to the same entity.

Seems perfectly understandable to English speakers. (And that's pretty close to how English grammar is defined by descriptive linguists.)

Have a look at http://fine.me.uk/Emonds/ for an exploration of these kinds of concepts.

[fuzztester]

Oh, it was perfectly understandable to me too, even though I am not a native English speaker (but I have been told by native speakers that my English is quite good).

"Everybody" seems to be in the third person and "you" is in the second person, so I thought it was a mismatch (since in the same sentence, etc.), and so was ungrammatical.

Let anyone tell me if I am wrong, would like to know.

And see my reply to sbuk, it was just in fun.

[eru]

Real world grammar is a lot more fluid and flexible, than just blindly following a bunch of fixed, mechanical rules.

The mechanical rules are just an imperfect attempt at capturing parts of the richness of real world language, or more precisely: language variants of different dialects and speakers.

Of course, there's a whole world of class markers overlaid here as well. If you want to sound middle-class educated in most of the English speaking world, you have to avoid "ain't" and say things like "It is I" or "Bob and I went shopping.", instead of the more natural "It's me!" or "Bob and me went shopping." That's what Emond calls 'Grammatically Deviant Prestige Constructions'. The whole point is that they aren't part of a naturally learnable variant of English, so they can only be acquired by schooling.

Most people who speak prestige-English over-generalise, and also say things like "She likes Bob and I.".

See fine.me.uk/Emonds/ for details.

[fuzztester]

>See fine.me.uk/Emonds/ for details.

Nope. Not important to me.

[dizhn]

Most places have "they" instead of "you" in the quote.

[eru]

That works, too.

[fuzztester]

It's more like that's the right form, not just "works too", for the reason I said about third and second person forms.

[fuzztester]

And anyway, simplicity, although I favor it a lot in my work, is not a virtue in itself. As for many, if not most issues, the answer is "It all depends.".