Talk:Phineas Gage

his desire to return to his family in New Hampshire being "uncontrollable by his friends ... got wet feet and a chill"

The following:

his desire to return to his family in New Hampshire being "uncontrollable by his friends ... got wet feet and a chill"

makes no grammatical sense. Somebody who understands what it's supposed to mean, please fix it. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 11:31, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Yes, it does look a bit like some [joining text in square brackets] is missing there. I can guess at what is meant. Martinevans123 (talk) 11:54, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

As can we all, except one of us apparently. I'm sure you join me in eager anticipation of CT's answer below. EEng 12:14, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Martinevans123: Can you fix it? It's gibberish as it stands. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 12:16, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

I'd really appreciate it if you'd answer my question below. EEng 12:23, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

To put things in context, let's give the whole more of the passage:

While Harlow was absent for a week Gage was "in the street every day except Sunday", his desire to return to his family in New Hampshire being "uncontrollable by his friends ... got wet feet and a chill". He soon developed a fever ...

Now, before we pass on to the question of whether the bit you quoted should be stiltedly recast to fit WP:MISSSNODGRASS' narrow ideas about what constitutes good writing, let me ask you one thing: do you really not "understand what it's supposed to mean"? Really? Be honest now. EEng 12:14, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

It's obvious - his desire got wet feet and a chill. Often happens, I suspect. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:23, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Grrr. I've still got that nuclear button on my desk, A Man Inverts. I'd still like an answer from CT. EEng 14:49, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

• I'm not willing to further engage with EEng and his insecurities—he's been on attack mode since I disagreed with him in this discussion. Martinevans123, since you say you understand what the text is trying to say, could you please fix it? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:34, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

  As you know, we underlings are only allowed two edits a week on this article by the Gagemeister. So I'll try for next Saturday, if that's ok. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:40, 9 January 2018 (UTC) ....meanwhile, I guess we could all study one of the sources kindly provided?

Without looking at the sources I expect it has something to do with Netflix, no? Though I can't quite work out what sort of sexual activity is implied by "wet feet". ...I hope he clipped his toenails first. nagualdesign 22:52, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

"In June 2016, singer-songwriter Danah released a song titled "Phin and Chill" on GunpowderCloud. The track, produced by Ed Wippy Lion, a member of Vermont pop-transit group Rutland Crew... is a tongue-in-cheek representation of the use of the tamping iron in popular culture." Martinevans123 (talk) 23:06, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Those things'll go right through you if you're not careful. I think that's why a lot of marital aids have vestigial organs. It's health and safety gone mad! nagualdesign 23:24, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Martinevans123: I have been going through some the sources—that's how I determined there were commas in quotes that weren't in the sources[4][5]—but dealing with EEng's editwarring and constant attacks has sapped my motivation. Given that he's editwarring over the tag already,[6][7] I don't trust him to "allow" me to attempt to fix it anyways, and I'm not going to get dragged into an editwar. Unless one of the other editors here is willing to fix this mess, I suppose EEng "wins" by attrition, as he did at Sacred Cod (still unfixed). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:09, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Now there's an article that deserves some deep attention, I'm sure. But "chill thy beans", dear Curls, I'm sure someone will suggest a suitable compromise. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:14, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

I hope so. The best solution would probably be to forego the whole awkward WP:QUOTEFARM style entirely, which makes for tiresome reading. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:19, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Yikes—I just took a stroll through the talkpage archives and edit history. There is no hope for "this mess of an article"^{[B1]:20[H]:4n[M]:43}—one of "the least^{[M]:17,41,90[M10]:643} pleasant reading experiences"^{[B1]:13-14[H]:5​​[M]:25-29​​[17]​​[19]} I've "had on Wikipedia".^{[M]:1,378[M2]:C​​[3]:1347​​[4]:56​​[K2]:abstr} Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 04:13, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

I hear that now and then from people who write articles nobody reads. But opinions vary. EEng 04:31, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Curious how EEng would characterize articles such as history of Japan, ukiyo-e, Maus, etc, as ones "nobody reads"—even more curious is that he would think pageviews justify poor editing. Maybe there's no more to this puzzling behaviour than an overwhelming desire to provoke other editors, which appears to be a motif in his editing history. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 04:57, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

OK, sorry, three of the literally 300 articles on your "Wikiresume" someone reads, though since you want to press the point, pageviews for those three articles together are roughly the same as this one alone. Pageviews don't "justify bad editing", but they do validate that many eyes are on the article, and that actual (not fanciful) issues are likely to be shaken out. I have no desire to provoke other editors, but I do have contempt for editors who want all articles refashioned according to their personal preferences – the "anodyne consistency" one editor referred to here. EEng 19:50, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm not sure why EEng is comparing the list of articles I've created to one he bagan to edit five years after it was created, or how EEng's penis-measuring contest is a logical defense of ugly prose. By that logic, Pornography—with seven times the pageviews over its lifetime—must have imerfectible, God-like prose. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:50, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

This isn't about "fixing" anything "wrong"; it's just a question of style. I forget the rhetorical term – it's something like an ellipsis, though there's some other more specific word for it – but this kind of switching horses midstream is an established technique, though little used because only occasionally does the opportunity arise to use it for what it's used for, which is to avoid stilted interpolations the reader will readily supply for himself. Sure, we could change it to say

While Harlow was absent for a week Gage was "in the street every day except Sunday", his desire to return to his family in New Hampshire being "uncontrollable by his friends ... [As a result he] got wet feet and a chill". He soon developed a fever ...

but that would dominate the quotation for no reason – the reader easily grasps what's going on without it. You would never do this in straight article text, but the ellipsis already in the quotation presents the opportunity. I did the same thing at Widener Library:

In 1910 a committee of architects termed Gore

unsafe [and] unsuitable for its object ... no amount of tinkering can make it really good ... hopelessly over­crowded ... leaks when there is a heavy rain ... intolerably hot in summer ... books are put in double rows and are not infrequently left lying on top of one another, or actually on the floor ...

With dormitory basements pressed into service as overflow storage for Harvard's 543,000 books, the committee drew up a proposal for replacement of Gore in stages.

Sure, this could be rewritten to read:

In 1910 a committee of architects termed Gore

unsafe [and] unsuitable for its object ... no amount of tinkering can make it really good ... hopelessly over­crowded [and] intolerably hot in summer ...

The committee also noted that Gore "leaks when there is a heavy rain" and that "books are put in double rows and are not infrequently left lying on top of one another, or actually on the floor". With dormitory basements pressed into service as overflow storage for Harvard's 543,000 books, the committee drew up a proposal for replacement of Gore in stages.

– but that would break up a nice passage for no purpose except to satisfy some WP:MISSSNODGRASSian compulsion. If my esteemed fellow editors really feel that a more conventional style will work better, fine, but the idea that the current text is somehow incomprehensible, or "wrong" is nonsense. EEng 00:49, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

And, as already noted but worth repeating, one should always avoid the possibility of breaking up a nice passage for no purpose except to satisfy. nagualdesign 01:26, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

• Comment The missing text in square brackets should be added, as otherwise the sentence is ungrammatical, but guessing at what is meant would be inappropriate as a basis for doing so, even if readers can easily do so. EEng is being disingenuous and violating AGF by accusing CT of "pretending" not to understand. Yes, CT can guess at what is meant as well as the rest of us, but doing so in order to fill out a quotation would be inappropriate; he was not wrong to tag the sentence in question. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:52, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Also, EEng, please drop the act with the citation of page view statistics as though each one of them is a separate person who has read through the entire article, noticed the grammatical error in the nineteenth paragraph, and decided it was not worth trying to fix -- I am probably five or six of the 7,000,000 people you refer to, and I never noticed the problem. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:57, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Of course he's pretending not to understand. Whether one likes the style or not, it's perfectly obvious that it was Gage who "got wet feet and a chill". As to page views, let's suppose each person returns to the article five or six times, as you did – in fact, let's call it seven. That's 1,000,000 distinct readers. Then let's assume only 1/20 of them read as far as this paragraph. That's still 50,000 distinct readers insufficiently puzzled to inquire or complain.

Anyway, the trouble with all this Miss Snodgrassian hand-wringing is that Harlow, who's being quoted, does exactly the thing you're complaining about:

The atmosphere was cold and damp, the ground wet, and he went without an overcoat and with thin boots; got wet feet and a chill.

Like I said, it's a perfectly acceptable technique, even if a little-used one. (And before you ask, he was writing in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal – what we now call The New England Journal of Medicine.) EEng 19:50, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

But that was in 1848, exactly 170 years ago? Fashions change, even in academic and professional journals? Martinevans123 (talk) 20:10, 10 January 2018 (UTC) (p.s. I wasn't going to ask)

Good point, but (a) on the whole usage becomes more flexible over time, not less; and (b) it's him I'm quoting. EEng 20:24, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

If it's that critical, could we include the whole sentence? But, I mean, "wet feet and a chill" isn't really medically knife-edge is it? Martinevans123 (talk) 20:56, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

I would say "on the whole usage becomes more flexible over time, not less" is an off-topic generality that had nothing to do with the present problem, as our article text ungrammatically distorts the quotation (the subject of "got" is clearly different), but it's not even true. Formal writing in 19th-century English had all sorts of conventions that were perfectly acceptable then but that any right-minded copy editor in 2017 would change. Ctrl+F this for "periodic style". Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:52, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Begin interlude

EEng accused me of bad faith over my edits at Sacred Cod, too—after lots of kicking and screaming, he had to issue a public apology at talk:MOS that I was right all along. Does EEng accuse everyone who disagrees with him of bad faith? He sure likes to fight with people on this talk page!

Someone forgot to add "one should be able to parse a sentence" to Miss Snodgrass's List of Lies. On second thought, leave it out—writing is so much easier when there's no rule binding the poor editor to make sense. The rule should be: the longer the penis, the less sense an editor is required to make. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:01, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

If only Sigmund was here. He'd have a field day? Martinevans123 (talk) 22:11, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

I wonder what he'd have to say about this obsession with "Miss Snodgrass".^{[M]:1,378[M2]:C​​[3]:1347​​[4]:56​​[K2]:abstr[M]:17,41,90[M10]:643[B1]:13-14[H]:5​​[M]:25-29​​[17]​​[19]}
(check out that "large iron rod‍"!^{[B2][31]:28[M10]:643-4[H]:14[M]:101​​[B1]:22n[36][M]:46-7}) Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:58, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Something to do with cranial trauma, I expect. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:04, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

• CT, I've never accused you of bad faith, unless you count my post a bit above wherein I asserted that you had pretended not to understand what the passage under discussion was meant to say, which you obviously had been doing.
• I did not "have to" issue an apology, but nonetheless I did, because that's what I do when I've sown confusion or caused inconvenience, even inadvertently. Good advice.
• What I said in that apology, which you have so thoughtfully linked, is that

  (a) I had misread the guideline; and

  (b) I was glad to see that there was discussion ongoing to correct the poor presentation which had misled me (along with many other editors, who had many times reinforced my misreading).

I said nothing about you being right because

(1) no one cares about that; and

(2) since you press the point, you were wrong about the most important point, which is that many people do, in fact, misunderstand LQ because of its poor presentation.

But really, can you take your anger elsewhere? – because

(α) you've been fulminating on Talk:MOS, on my talk page, and now here for several days, and you're frightening the horses; and

(β) this is an article talk page, for discussing possible changes to the article; you said above that you didn't want to participate in that, so if you must keep bleating please do it on my talk page, though I'd rather you didn't do that either.

EEng 01:30, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

"CT, I've never accused you of bad faith, [except for when I did]".^{[B2][31]:28[M10]:643-4[H]:14[M]:101​​[B1]:22n[36][M]:46-7[M]:1,378[M2]:C​​[3]:1347​​[4]:56​​[K2]:abstr[M]:17,41,90[M10]:643[B1]:13-14[H]:5​​[M]:25-29​​[17]​​[19]}

"... many people do, in fact, misunderstand LQ because of its poor presentation ..."—EEng has yet to demonstrate that this applies very widely at all (the discussion at talk:MoS was unanimous against his interpretation—but at least he's no longer asserting "most people"). But here we're talking about fixing this piece of garbage prose in Phineas Gage, which has nothing to do with LQ. Of course, EEng'll go off about LQ, pageviews, etc. again—anything but about how to fix the garbage prose. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:52, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

That discussion is below. This section is for you to rant and me to gently correct you. EEng 02:15, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Do I detect the very faintest suggestion of animosity between you two? I fear it may be getting in the way of finding a solution here. Perhaps you could both take a step back and let other "less involved" editors find a solution? Martinevans123 (talk) 10:42, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Scroll down and you'll see I've already disengaged; scroll up and you'll see I've been asking someone else to handle this all along. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 12:25, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

I applaud your sense of perspective. Perhaps this interlude could be hatted, lest folks think you or EEng bear some kind of slight grudge? Martinevans123 (talk) 12:31, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Resuming discussion

OK, Martin, where were we? Ah yes... Well, if we include the entire sentence we have

While Harlow was absent for a week Gage was "in the street every day except Sunday", his desire to return to his family in New Hampshire being "uncontrollable by his friends ... The atmosphere was cold and damp, the ground wet, and he went without an overcoat and with thin boots; got wet feet and a chill." He soon developed a fever ...

which would be just as "ungrammatical" (according to Miss Snodgrass) as before. EEng 01:30, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Just what the fuck did "Miss Snodgrass" do to EEng? If her "thing" is readable prose, then I'm afraid I have to take her side. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:57, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

You seem upset. EEng 02:15, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

You seem pleased. Why not just write prose that gets to the point? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 02:23, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm pleased discussion is able to proceed despite your ranting. EEng 02:32, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

"despite [my] ranting [about some 'Miss Snodgrass']" <-- fixed that for you. The text, anyways—I wouldn't pretend to fix the underlying issues.

I hope Martin or someone else will be able to solve the problem, and I hope it takes fewer than another 14 archive pages of EEng sneering and kicking up drahmah over people trying to fix the mess of an article he constructed from other people's words.

I'm giving you the last word, EEng—apparently you have some idea of what that should mean. Just skip fucking with the indenting when you post your next witty comeback. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 04:09, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Anyway, Martin, you see what I mean about including the full sentence (aside from the fact that all that detail about the weather and the coat and the boots probably [oops, left this word out before: don't] help the reader much)? EEng 16:24, 11 January 2018 (UTC) Added missing word 18:50, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

I quite like the weather and the coat and the thin boots, as I think they make the meaning much clearer. Alternatively, I'd be happy to see the quote truncated after "uncontrollable by his friends...". But I'd also be happy to see suggestions from other editors. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:37, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

I concur with Martin that the details of the weather, coat and boots should be included; they put the chill in context and make it clear that his becoming ill was as a result of inappropriate clothing, not infection relating to his injury. On the broader WP:QUOTEFARM issue, I'd say this article is an exceptional case. Gage is noteworthy not so much for his injury, but for the manner in which he became a minor figure in popular culture, and as such it makes sense to include more reactions of his contemporaries, and descriptions of him by those who met him, to put the later semi-mythical literary construct of 20th-century pop-psych books in context. (The alternative approach with topics like this of separate articles for "verified facts about the person" and "popular perceptions of the person and how they came to be believed"—as we do with figures as varied as Vincent van Gogh, the Zodiac Killer, Nikola Tesla and Benjamin Franklin—would also be viable, although it has the unfortunate side-effect of tending to make the parent biography rather dry and boring.) ‑ Iridescent 16:58, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, Arid Desicant, you've put the situation very succinctly. I'm happy to better emphasize the cause of the fever, but in the interests of brevity I wonder if we can just add the apparel but let the reader realize for himself that the weather wasn't sunny and warm:

While Harlow was absent for a week Gage was "in the street every day except Sunday", his desire to return to his family in New Hampshire being "uncontrollable by his friends ... he went without an overcoat and with thin boots; got wet feet and a chill." He soon developed a fever [etc etc]

Thoughts? EEng 18:50, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

No objection. But let's see what "Erect Dis In" has to say. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:57, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Let's hope he brings some dry wit to bear. EEng 19:00, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

"cringe".... I now feel suitably cretinised. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:17, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Iridescent: while I obviously disagree about the nauseous QUOTEFARM style, as well as many other editorial choices that degrade the article's reading experience, the goal of the discussion—the only goal of the discussion—is to have a single broken passage fixed. All the drahmah has erupted from an attempt to obstruct fixing this single broken passage. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:42, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

• There being no further relevant comment, I'll go ahead and install that last proposal. EEng 16:06, 14 January 2018 (UTC)