Your use of "meritocratic" doesn't seem to fit standard uses of that term, as Haus indicates.
I find it very exact which is comfortable to me.
Well, 1) it is jargon. 2) it comes from a specific tradition that requires many years of legal training, so it may be "comfortable" for you, but that's the biggest problem with jargon: not just that it's occasionally annoying, but that it's impenetrable.
I tried to google "meritocratic division of opinion" in fact in order to see if maybe it's a phrase that's widely used anywhere, found no examples in the world of google. If you google "define: "passive voice" you'll find several clear definitions.
It's arguably jargon, I suppose, but we teach this phrase to children at about 7th or 8th grade in the US (13/14 year olds)--not that they apparently retain it. It's possible a different term is often used in UK schools for this grammatical structure: In the passive voice, the subject receives the action of the verb (eg The President was killed). See also Active Voice..
Outside of law and some other disciplines, style books caution against it, as it has the effect of concealing the actor(s) or agent(s) in a sentence, and is often, but not always, obfuscatory. In Politics and the English Language(British writer) George Orwell lists the use of the passive voice as one of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged. And, he notes: The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.
The politics of your prose's impenetrability in that thread in particular are problematic, as I tried to indicate, particularly given what fred and lepidopteran had pointed out, and which you didn't ever address. No one writes perfect prose all the time, but to defend your own prose with "well I'm comfortable with it" is no defense at all.
By the way, on re-reading it, that Orwell essay should be required reading for Barbelith. |
