Why simple is so complicated

The other day I was in one of my regular meetings with my thesis advisor, and we had been going over several items of an upcoming survey for the past hour. Our goal was to simplify the language used as much as possible so it could be easily understandable by any participant, regardless of their background and, most importantly, to be free of any biases which our choice of words and even the sentence structure could carry. “It’s not easy making simple things, is it?”, he said, and I couldn’t agree more. For years I’ve noticed people excelling at complex everyday tasks like baking cakes and concocting near professional dishes, but then serving tea that tasted of burned leaves, not being able to produce a boiled egg as they had intended, or even something as basic and keeping house. Anybody who has grown up in a Mediterranean household has heard their elders menace children that if they don’t study, all they be able to do for a living is clean. Knowing what I know now, my answer to them would be: as if that were so simple!

Right: The classic wall decor at Apple's

… and it isn’t!??Part of it is because a lot of us stopped doing these simple tasks daily or technology has brought a lot of shortcuts to parts of these tasks (e.g. vacuum cleaners help a lot, but one couldn’t say that just by vacuuming your house it becomes automatically cleaned, right?). Unlike previous generations, (most) Gen Xers were not brought up on the “joys” of manual labor and helping around the house — there was no need. A recent article in?The Atlantic?mentioned that a lot of Gen Zers can’t read cursive because it simply wasn’t part of their school’s curricula — can you imagine that? If you can’t, your grandparents are also saying the same thing about that sorry cup of tea you just made them.?

Same thing with my little “language simplification” issue… The more schooling we do, the more complicated our language tends to be. Rare cases like Hemingway, a literary giant, whose prose is simple, direct and overall straightforward, were brought on by necessity, or so legend says. If you have never heard about his lost suitcase containing a book due for publication and how he had to re-write most of it, and fast, I highly recommend you look it up — it’s very handy for small talk. You’ll thank me later. So whenever you’re looking to make things simple, do it the Hemingway way: know exactly what you need to do and then do it. The daiquiris are optional.

Above: I like this story so much, I've used in a presentation about Belk, 1988!

Below: One of my favorite scenes from Midnight in Paris, where Gil (Owen Wilson) feeds Hemingway (Corey Stoll) the line attributed to Hemingway about how modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn.