this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Ah. OK. So I speak a language, where such constructions are a bit more normal, except commas and dashes are used more generously, and synthetic grammar helps.
"You can fit a (can't stress how good) planetary map into RAM wholly" might be a bit better? Anyway. OK, they're struggling. They are choosing a weird way to inform me of what.
Side thoughts in the middle of sentences are definitely weird in written form. Heck they get messy in spoken form too! Some punctuation to help the reader understand what's being communicated can go a long way, and in the format of a forum discussion where folks will quickly tap out a brain fart from a 5" slab of plastic and glass, when I see what appear to be multiple sentences mashed together into one incoherent one, I'll generally assume it's a writing error, because folks don't proof read, they aren't writing literature with multiple drafts. They're just quickly jotting down a thought or two and somethimes errors compound with that level of quick communication
That depends on the language. Similarly to how different prosody doesn't indicate different national character or whatever.
In Russian that's normal enough, in German much more. Considering some weak sides of the English language, might not work.
That's super interesting! I didn't know other languages handled side thoughts better!
Not better, it's more of rules of punctuation and word order and such, in their normalized forms, being more fit for one use or another. At the expense of something.
Like those enormous sentences in German building up to unload like a cannon volley with one verb in the end. I also hate German capitalization. But it's impressive how many floors an atom can have, so to say, in one literate German sentence. Perhaps their capitalization is too caused by necessity, I can't bear trying to read Dutch, the eye has nothing to cling at.
Or in Russian there's no strict word or sentence order, but playing with them one can give different flavors to whatever they are saying. Where you should use commas and where dashes (and sometimes semicolons), and where you can skip those and where you can't, and whether you are giving a different intonation or meaning to your phrase or just making a mistake ; taken together - whether such a thing as "author's individual punctuation" exists in Russian or not.
(All people actually writing well in Russian whom I know, BTW, make mistakes all the time by common rules and definitely have their own punctuation. And this is not much of a rebellion, they praise Zhukovsky - he made his own rules, they praise Pushkin - that punk not only made his own rules, he also used lots of Church Slavic not knowing the difference between that and archaic Russian, they praise Mayakovsky - well, that type wouldn't object to any abuse of formal rules.)
I mean, I admit I often write in very bad English, but saying "you should proofread your texts" was absolutely useless, that person could just quote the specific place politely.