"TRUTH IS BEAUTY IN - SEO - SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION"
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As a young academic and business law scholar I made my mark as the author / composer of legal court documents, on behalf of both myself and external clients. I became a kind of machine for grinding theories and texts out of small pieces of facts; and as Mark Twain formulated it: "Facts are stubborn." I followed the trail of crumbs. Truth and conscience forces impelled me beyond my own control - though not in the Jedi sense.Soon followed a dawning realization that legal affairs are ugly.
The legal courts inherent flaw, its lack of autonomy - beholden to all, master of none - was always addressed. We might call it unbiased, neutral, disinterested. However, those desriptions seem too clever by half. Alas, the reality is frequently more pedestrian. I was not Bambi's little brother, and neither were individual, opposing lawyers, nor the court's presiding judges. It was not always pretty.
“The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It’s said by a character called Dick the Butcher in Act IV, Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, which was (we think) written between 1596 and 1599. Shakespeare also wrote later: "Save a place in Hell, since there are some lawyers passing away soon." Bear in mind, in legal battles, preparedness, a good thought and a sharp pen is worth a lot more than a sword.
Some judges are no doubt sophisticated stylists, however, most legal language is fussy, tangled and incapable of producing anything so pithy. (This is no doubt one reason so many people want to kill all the lawyers.) But do lawyers write that way to impress, to confuse - or perhaps they must?
Often it turns out that lawyers struggle with, and dislike, legal language almost as much as their clients. Legalese is heavy on "centre-embedding", sentences in which related words are separated by a long insertion, as in "It is understood by artist and company that comprehensive liability insurance, protecting against any claim or demand up to $450,000, including attorney's fees, related to company's actions under this venue agreement, shall be purchased and maintained throughout the agreement by company."
All these wrangles put a heavy strain on the brain's working memory. The word "insurance" must be held in the mind while some 20 other words go by before its attendant werb phrase "shall be purchased" arrives.
Are we encountering "the curse of knowledge"; the idea that many learned people do not know how to write for those less informed than themselves? A more cynical idea is the "it's just business" hypothesis; a theory that lawyers are intentionally opaque so as to gull clients into paying more for their supposed expertise.
Perhaps legalese is a form of "in-group signalling" - behaviour used to signal belonging to a group, such as religious iconography or flag-waving at sports events, and aimed at fellow lawyers rather than clients? The most common defence of legalese is the need for precision; i.e., it is too important to leave to the imprecisions of ordinary style.
We believe the reason is more simple, which we call "copy-and-paste hypothesis". Lawyers - and other legal professionals as judges, et al - imitate what other colleagues have done. After all, a good deal of rote legal work (such as drawing up contracts or formulating verdicts) can be copied in large chunks from one document to another.
Whatever the hidden reason-s, changing behaviour will be hard. Experts in legal writing have called for clearer prose for decades. But the plague of legalese persists. Perhaps evidence from outside the profession will help change things - especially if it is written in plain language, and taught legal students early on, albeit there is an old saw that goes as follows: "Those who can do; those who can't, teach."
Familiarity breeds complacency. And complacency sometimes leaves the door open for truly simple, evolutionary language as can be used in contemporary Search Engine Optimization - SEO - efforts:
"Bob's your uncle - The penny dropped - Bite the bullet - Ball's in your court - Over the moon & Shake a leg."
A successful painting artist - say a Monet, a Picasso - has often less skills than the educated teaching headmaster or president of an arts academy. It is not about skills per se, but about conceptuality and talent. Some say the best weapon against misinformation is the truth, not an embarrassed silence; others that prestige can not survive without mystery and that familiarity breeds contempt.
Friedrich Nietzsche stated the ultimate objective as a search for the truth. Our Search Engine Optimization - SEO - style includes clarity and simplicity that come from matching language to thought on the motive of truth. Our motive is pure truth, our Search Engine Optimization purpose is presentation.
Nietzsche was a writer; his proper medium is words. By putting into spellbinding words - Nietzsche's metaphors are vital mental shorthand; great balls of fire - his confidence in [discovering] truth gave us something nobody else could: the precise nuance of solitaire and/or Gestalt.
This eternal thing: truth. Is truth ever barren? Truth (we say) is the daughter of time. When is the truth approaching from the dim horizon? How will it look? Why is it hiding? How will it appear, now and then; in the future, when we need it so desperately? We should insist on probing, seeking, enquiring for deeper and deeper truths. (We might quote Lewis Carroll, in the Bellman in The Hunting of the Snark: "What I tell you three times is true!")
"Plato is dear to me, but truth is dearer still," as Aristotle expressed it in his desparate search for a final verification.
Personally, I believe you can often be too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek the truth, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.
We can say of a phenomenon or a truth that it is as it appears. Why not push the idea to its limit and say that the being of the appearance is its appearing? This is simply a way of choosing new words to clothe the old "Esse est percipi" (To be is to be perceived) of Berkeley. The percipi would refer to the percipiens - the known to knowledge and knowledge to the being who knows (in his capacity as being, not as being known).
Good sense and reason is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that even the most difficult to please in all other matters do not commonly desire more of it than they already possess. Good sense or Reason seems to be by nature equal in all men.
Hence too it will show that the diversity of our opinions does not proceed from some men being more rational than others, but solely from the fact that our thoughts pass through diverse channels and the same objects are not considered by all. For to be possessed of Good sense and Reason is not sufficient; the principal matter is to apply them well.
Are we allowed to bend the truth in our sincere Search Engine Optimization efforts and endeavours in order to improve - or firmly exaggerate - its appearance. Are we allowed to ruthlessly apply our reasoning and writing skills on behalf of clients and their Search Engine Optimization needs? May it turn out to be an "easy cake" or a "pie in the sky"?
Let us further delve into truth and reason. A scientific approach to Search Engine Optimization - SEO - does not consist solely, or even mainly, in a complete system and a comprehensive, coherent theory. There must be no conflict between common sense and sound theory since sound theory rest on common sense [and genius], or give them expression.
Appeals to common sense are a staple of Search Engine Optimization - SEO, especially when an insurgent wishes to distinguish himself from a supposedly aloof and out-of-touch elite. We can note that the standard concept of common sense has a somewhat circular definition: common sense is a set of claims that sensible people agree with, and sensible people are those who possess common sense.
As common sense might have predicted, we find that plainly worded claims concerning facts about the real world are the most likely to be rated as demonstrating common sense. However, truly "common" sense is an elusive thing.
Theory can do no better than show how and why this should be the case. Pity the theory that conflicts with reason. Theory and its resultant formulas are thus subordinate to the great creative talent, and to the universals of reason and feeling that it expresses. Complexity is the SEO of tomorrow. The issue of freedom of writing is not black and white. How will you navigate the nuances of the web? Technology, reason, intelligence will be decisive.
CG Ekman outside Wordchain's / Boutique Ekman's corporate HQ enroute to a meeting with multinational clients evaluating Search Engine Optimization - SEO - possibilities and challenges throughout the Americas.
GOOGLE & THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
When we battle with International Search Engine Optimization - SEO - we immediately come across two phenomena: Google and the English Language. Google is an imperative in dealing with successful global SEO, and so is colloquial English.
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Google search is - as we have written before - undoubtedly one of the best business models of all time, providing Alphabet with whopping profit margins. Might Generative AI shift the overall picture? It provides answers, not links, hence less granularity for advertisers. Could Google's search business turn from a blessing to a curse? Will Generative AI sustain enhanced innovation - making good products better? Will exercise of raw Google power sustain its model - or will its power be in decline?
Google is an early trailblazer in the SEO - Search Engine Optimization - jungle. Age, they say, bring wisdom. But it also brings decrepitude. When the latter begins to outweigh the former, perhaps it is time for even the most ambitious to consider retiring into slippered ease. The most popular scientific explanation of ageing, disposable-soma theory, holds that natural selection hones youth at the expense of age, since this best serves the the task passing genes to the next generation.
However, the science of aging is uncertain, and Google is not the evil ninja as some depict it; perhaps more of a rational "constant foe and fickle friend". Google has the purpose and the means to optimize an efficient, effective and efficacious search engine optimization process ultimately - doing good and selling adverts. Do not judge its magnanimously pertinent search results a "fruit of the poisonous tree", and this hyperbole is clearly denied by Google themselves. That the Alphabet Group - parent company of Google, et al - are making an "enormous imposition" on global matters is, however, not in doubt.
There are no rules in Search Engine Optimization - SEO - but there are certainly guidelines. Without the American hegemon, though, it is still hard to envisage the Europeans mustering a coherent response. History suggests that the state - or group of states such as the EU - and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are unpromising bedfellows. Google has warned that they will not be forced into what has been called a "swamp" of drawn-out discussions of anti-competitive behaviour, nor looking forward having the spotlight of blame for a bureaucratic Europe swinging to them.
As Google has become the self-appointed SEO master-species, do we respect other sentient creatures with whom we share the net, whom we have characterized as below us in the scale of evolution or understanding or moral sense perhaps? After the multitude of words and images from and about Google, has anything of value been learned? The manufactured text has been so successful that Google convinced themselves of its limpieza de sangre - purity of the blood - and hence of its value and truth; and all absolutely understandable given the dismal performance of its competitors.
Google - nor any other man-controlled organization will volontarily emasculate the vigorous natural impulses; nothing is true, everything is permitted - a theory of relativity in values that naturally followed the removal of any fixed point of reference. Small wars ... are already throwing up some big lessons. "Nations, companies, as well as men," de Tocqueville observed, "almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years."
As an early British governor, from 1858, who pithily summed up the ethos of British sovereignity over Hong Kong once stated: "We rule them in ignorance, and they submit in blindness." Finding a course between ignorance and blindness involves much semantic and legal contortion. Grace, clarity and originality are qualities that a reader recognize and care about. For inquiring, for reflecting, for reasoning, for demonstrating language is obviously the essential tool. Ultimately one reaches the unknowable, and that is where I arrived.
Justice as informal, ad hoc judgements undisciplined by general rules. We see specialized, professional, and rule-bound approaches as the final stage in the evolution of law. No doubt I have slipped up here and there or allowed emotion to cloud the text, but I believe you will not find the words "ignorance" or "blindness" to describe the utterly nauseating things herein exaggerated.
Stagnant search engines will face Capitis diminutio - the most ancient law of Vae victis. Other search engines are simply not peer competitors. An intellectual may say a simple thing in a hard way. An artist may say a hard thing in a simple way. Different governments are insinuating the tu quoque - or "you too" - principle as a back door. Google may state Que sera sera - "whatever will be, will be" or Est quod est - "it is what it is", and rightly so from their position of strength.
This issue of dominance is une question de vie et de mort for a great many companies since Google owns more than 90% of the existing and most important highway. Human proclivity - we are not thinking of artificial intelligence - for evil force us looking into the truth, not into proof; not even facts that fit a posited theory. In a scientific age it is a comfort since it offers "explanation" - in language that can be mistaken as scientific - and the inference that "normal" organisations do not act monopolistic.
A man or a company is not what he/it does so much as what he/it is allowed to do; otherwise what would each of us not do to change the world and our lives. Human nature is what it is. In this type of limited vista, at least, even the masters of Search Engine Optimization - SEO - see the writing on the wall. Meanwhile the U.S. Administration's fundamental concern is to fight what the White House perceives as a European tendency to try to make everybody's regime as business-unfriendly as possible.
The dysfunction that hampers America's dealings with Europe - and the world - comes just when Mr Trump wants to dissolve alliances to counterbalance rivals. A man of action, Mr Trump, reacts to opposition forcefully, albeit quixotically, imposing tariffs on a vast range of imports. Europeans might now swallow Chinese arguments "like candy", albeit a predictable if not universal pattern, the ordo salutis, by which the EU turn sinners into saints is up in the air.
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... English style, familiar but not coarse, elegant but not ostentatious ... - Samuel Johnson
Now, anyone familiar with the history of English prose might wonder whether anything we do here will substantially improve its future. Since the earliest times, many writers have graced us with much good writing. But others have afflicted us with much that is bad. Some of the reasons for the bad writing are rooted in history, others in personal experience.
Let us back up the truck for a minute before we proceed with recent linguistic evolution: The Yamnaya culture, who lived 5,000 years ago in what is today's Ukraine, are considered to have transformed Europe and much of Asia genetically, culturally and linguistically. Among the many innovations these steppe migrants ushered in, scientists believe, are the Indo-European languages that are dominant in Europe today, and which are spoken by nearly half of humanity.
The Yamnaya descendants succeeded in imposing their genes and languages on a territory that extended, eventually, from Ireland to the Altai Mountains of Central Asia. Language, like culture, does not require mass migration to spread but painstaking reconstructions of the vocabulary of early Indo-European languages, based on comparisons of their living descendants, indicate that their speakers knew wheeled transport, practised dairying and possibly rode horses. Most scientists are convinced the Yamnaya spread these languages throughout the Old World.
By the time the Yamnaya moved on from what is now Hungary, leaving the steppe for Europe's temperate forests, they were no longer Yamnaya. Those migrants carried Yamnaya genes, but by now these were mixed with those of the indigenous farmers. Their culture had changed too, borrowing from local ones, and the blending continued as they moved west, until finally, around 4,500 years ago, the Yamnaya's genetic signature showed up in the British Isles. Their descendants had expanded as far as they could, and in just a couple of centuries.
Science must include some arts; and vice versa. There surely existed arts in Europe before the Yamnayas arrived. One has recently discovered evidence of a beautiful art gallery from 15,000 years ago, first excavated at Montastruc in France, near Toulouse. This was created by the Magdalenian people. This seemingly art-minded culture spread throughout western Europe between roughly 23,000 and 14,000 years ago. The Montastruc art features carved depictions of then-common local wildlife, such as the ibex and cattle-like aurochs. Did they evoke the high-minded pursuit of an artistic vision throughout Europe? Were the two states, writing and arts, linked? We do not know. It all remains dimly lit.
Let us back up the truck a further 0.3m to 2m-3m years.
"Strictly a Science; also an Art. -Whately's Elements of Logic. Indeed ought we not to regard all Art as applied Science; unless we are willing, with 'the multitude,' to consider Art as guessing and aiming well?" -Plato; Philebus.
Is art and linguistic science / semantics in symbiosis? Of course they are. Both emanate and evolve from one another. The evolution of intelligence in humans and their ancestors was driven by ever-larger brains enabling more complex behaviours, such as better designs for stone tools, or abstract ideas expressed through culture, language and art.
Recently scientists have provided evidence that Homo naledi - a new species of hominin who was assumed ceasing to exist 2m-3m years ago, still roamed the planet some-time between 235,000 and 335,000 years ago. That would have made it a rough contemporary of the earliest humans. Can we deduce how its mind worked? Rock engravings and shallow graves indicate the ability to reason about abstract ideas such as mortality, identity and language.
The engravings found take the form of nearly 50 lines etched deep into rock, which intersect to form squares, triangles and crosses. The depth of the carvings means the markings were unlikely to have been made idly. The engravings are really deliberate art, meaning H. naledi joins Neanderthals and H. sapiens, both of which had much bigger brains, as the only hominins with an artistic bent. Art is an example of the sort of symbolic thinking that most believe to be a precursor to language and high-level cognition.
If H. naledi with a tiny brain - roughly half the size of a typical human ditto relative to the size of its body - was thinking along artificial lines and showed sophisticated behaviour, it seems human history and human semantics is even more crowded than scientists had thought. As H. naledi was as clever as it seems do make things very tangled...