The difference is that you use the "and" only in the case where the last adjective plus the noun are not already a common phrase and thus act as a de facto noun. E.g. "unhealthy and fast food" seems awkward compared to "unhealthy fast food" because "fast food" is a common phrase.
(I never thought about this question till you asked. I just knew I never would have said something so awkward.)
This discussion reminds of the Oxford comma style/grammar debates. Similar situation too: whether to use a comma before the and/or/nor of the last item in a 3+ list. For example: "morning, noon, and night" vs "morning, noon and night".
I never thought about this until I read your comment and think I would have always chosen "morning, noon and night" as the correct version, but now that I've thought about it, I like "morning, noon, and night" better because I've found the other variant clumsy in certain situations. Sure, those situations are probably signs of badly constructed sentences (eg, nested lists or lists as an aside[1]), but still! The difference is that if I have a list "a,b and c" which is itself followed by a comma "(a,b and c),d" - to me, it looks like "a,(b and c),d" - but if there is a comma before the "and" it doesn't: "(a,b,and c), d" - the "and" now implies that c is the last item of the list, making the nesting obvious.
Just something that popped into my mind just now.
[1] Example: "I find lists which are followed by a comma, such as morning, noon and night, look awkward" vs "I find lists which are followed by a comma, such as morning, noon, and night, look awkward" - the first one reads as if "noon and night" is one item in the list, the second one as two (with night as the final item).
Real people tend not to speak in grammatically correct sentences during conversations. Journalists tend to add words like "and" in quotations where the verbatim quote is not grammatically correct, but the meaning is clear.
In formal writing, the inserted word or phrase is supposed to be enclosed in square brackets to indicate that it is not the original source speaking: "he wanted to go to [the] circus".
The slightly more obnoxious "sic" can be used when you want to leave the grammatical error in, indicating that the error is in the original source: "he wanted to go to circus [sic]".
"Being misquoted" usually implies that the semantic meaning of what was written is different from what was said. It does not usually mean articles and transitive words were added.
Have you ever tried to transcribe anything? It's crazy how much garbage comes out with the actual words that form the sentences. Many amazing writers (not to mention linguists) have made their careers developing new written languages to attempt to get a little closer to capturing it, but capturing it is both impossible and an exercise in art, not a sane journalistic practice.
Who reads newspapers or magazines anymore... certainly not me. I expect a quote to be exactly what was said... if someone is correcting the speaker then it's not a quote but a paraphrase. I don't care what the journalist calls it, it's not a quote to me if it isn't exactly what was said.
Well I think there is a major difference, you can be a perpetual grad student but get good stuff done. Usually you end up as a post doc for a while but never get a real prof position for whatever political reason. I know a lot of good grad student that are in school after almost a decade (in grad school).
So the ineffectual part is a major difference.
There also people like me, sticking around universities for a while, using public funds to code cool projects that wouldn't happen anywhere else because it's not something that would be commercializable. I wouldn't call myself ineffectual ;)
I don't think there is a semantic difference, since I would probably transcribe what pg said he said as "ineffectual, perpetual grad student." Note the comma, which implies an "and" relationship between adjectives.
I believe gparent was pointing out that the phrase "ineffectual and perpetual grad student", nuance aside, literally means the same thing as "ineffectual perpetual grad student".
In my mind inserting the 'and' separates the 'ineffectual' and 'perpetual' so it appears the person being described could be a perpetual grad student as an independent idea -- but maybe they just love school life, so it's not really anything negative. Leaving the 'and' out, however, implies to me the person is probably a perpetual grad student because of being ineffectual.
Exactly what I'm thinking. If you remove the and there are two interpretations ( blame english for this). both ineffectual and perpetual or just perpetual or just ineffectual.
Yes, unfortunately no language is an optimum form of communication, so we rely on other cues (often body language when available) to try to determine what an author/speaker really means to convey. Word choice does play a role in that, which is why I think pg (or anybody) would prefer to be quoted correctly :)
semi-related: do you ever get tired of interviews that amount to "So what do you look for in a company?" "Well we look at the founders, more than the idea."? I'm always impressed at how genial you are in answering the world's most predictable questions in these interviews with big business outlets.
No, I don't mind. Actually I suspect most people never get bored of explaining something they're interested in. E.g. imagine asking a model train enthusiast or butterfly collector about their hobby. You'd probably get bored before they would.
Surely, but if a journalist does even the slightest bit of homework on his past interviews they could very easily upgrade to something like "I know you've said you focus on the team rather than the idea when selecting applicants..." and go on to ask something more substantive or insightful - or not.
They could even follow up with something like "how do you know" or "were there some specific failures that lead to this policy" and then they could at least have a conversation. As it stands, I could do a comparable interview using b-roll.
> if a journalist does even the slightest bit of homework
Well there's your problem.
Journalists need to get their 200 words and get out and on to the next job. There isn't enough time to study the subject of an interview. And often the assignment is at very short notice. "Jim, today you're interviewing Paul Graham. Jill, you're talking to Larry Ellison."
That could be a good way but I guess it may the case of a journalist thinking about his audience; she wanted to put the "we look at the founder" mantra down in the interview piece because there may be still many people who have not heard that super punchline!
That is something I've always agreed with. I have respect for someone that goes from undergrad to doctorate, but I certainly have no admiration for them.
I don't think this is what he meant. After all, PG does have a PhD. I think he's referring to those multiple-masters degrees grad students, or the 10+ year grad student and still no PhD...
That is very true. I guess I should have explained myself.
During my years in college, a lot of grad and doctorate students would come in and try to help undergrads with their studies, projects, research, senior design projects etc.. What I came to realize is that you can't take what they say too seriously especially when you're aspiring to create something out of the ordinary. For me they weigh too heavily on research, research, research and if you can't validate every single thing you do, then don't do it. I don't agree with that, if you have an idea and think it'll work, do it, and if you execute it properly you will have some degree of success. For me that's the attitude that most of them had. Don't get me wrong, they were extremely intelligent but were too constrained by exact academic procedure and a lot of them had no experience in the real world, let alone the startup world. They would shoot down ideas and make you do ridiculous things for projects, that to me, made no sense and took away time from working on your product. I am not saying those things have no place, but at least from my experience, they weren't terribly interesting people, they were institutionalized by the academic system and didn’t really understand what you were trying to do.
When I say I have no admiration, I don't want to label every PHD that way. They are brilliant people. But for me when you do 4 years as an undergrad, go straight to your Masters in the same school and then to your Doctorate in the same school without anything in between, that doesn't require a lot of determination and resourcefulness. It's a lot easier and less risky to do that than create a startup around a crazy idea and potentially crash and burn. Then again, it might just have been my school.
I'm finishing up my PhD this year (haven't set a defense day yet, but I'm aiming for June at this point), and finishing a dissertation requires piles of determination.
What I came to realize is that you can't take what they say too seriously especially when you're aspiring to create something out of the ordinary.
I can't comment on your personal experience with grad students (I use grad to mean both Masters and PhD students), but I can say that just like people everywhere else, there is a wide variety of interests and abilities. Just like with job applicants, it's easy to see a sample biased by the "bad" ones. The sampling problem is even worse for grad students, the ones lacking in drive, creativity, or intelligence tend to stick around their programs longer [1]. The only other comment that I'll add is, depending on the program, there probably isn't much incentive to work with undergrads in the capacity you are talking about. So the determined/driven/focused grad students will not do it very much. You may have been steered towards projects because it was closer to what they work on, or would explore a question that they had personal interest in.
do 4 years as an undergrad, go straight to your Masters in the same school and then to your Doctorate in the same school
This is a warning sign. Staying at the same school for undergrad and grad school is called academic inbreeding. If it's a rarity, it's probably a special case that you can ignore (maybe that student was just particularly awesome). If it's common, the program may not be trying hard enough in admissions or perhaps something worse.
In my program, there are many students (including me) that did not go straight through undergrad to grad school.
tl;dr Just like everywhere else, the awesome people move through grad school quickly and the less awesome people tend to stick around. It's more likely that you were encountering the less awesome people.
[1] That's not to say that sticking around a PhD program for more than 5 years is an indication that a person lacks drive, creativity or intelligence. Life happens. Babies, sickness, bad breaks etc..
Actually I'm sure most people that have PhDs will tell you that finishing a dissertation requires a large amount of determination, bordering on obsessiveness.
I sort of addressed this in my above comment. Success in academic research, like success in startups, is more dependent on determination than intelligence.
