# Can anybody easily understand Leo Bloom? **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [June 16, 2018, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203 "2018-06-16T14:04:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Ambivalid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a5b964/32.png) [@Ambivalid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ambivalid)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/41 "2018-06-17T02:12:10Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > He not only is snarky, he responds by just referring people back to his OP. “See query”. ---
**Author:** ![Arjuna34](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/eb8c5e/32.png) [@Arjuna34](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arjuna34)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/42 "2018-06-17T03:34:13Z")
> [@kayT](#): > > OK, then, can you explain to me what part seems hard to understand? I feel like this has been asked before and the answer seemed to be “because the OP is always hard to follow”. I certainly don’t mean to say that everyone who didn’t get it was asking for simple ideas simply expressed, but a few people did say if they didn’t immediately grasp the first sentence of an OP they would go elsewhere. Here’s an example, as I posted in the other thread. Every sentence or fragment below is missing an explicit subject, verb, or both. The longest “sentence” seems to be a winding prepositional phrase without either one. Some of these can be interpolated or guessed at, but it becomes more difficult when a significant fraction (or all!) of the post is like this. > [@Leo Bloom](#): > > Less personal. As to game proposals within OPs, and in entire OPs newly posted, as it seems to me, where the thread has sub-topics only about answering something with a personal response, ordinarily not related to topics where the temperature of the interplay (ie, “fighty” topics). Even though to some people preferring ale over stout, eg, can be as fighty as topics of the 2017 election. > > See above and reverse. Also see OP subject header, for starts. > > Asked and answered. ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/43 "2018-06-17T03:44:37Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > **Leo** has had feedback many many times over the years about how to write more clearly. In the thread in question, **Riemann** gave him an extensive explanation of what was wrong with his OP. **Leo** mostly put the blame on other people for failing to understand his posts, rather than trying to take any responsibility for trying to communicate better. > > **Leo** is kind of like the person who can’t sing who grabs the mike in the karaoke bar, and when people criticize his singing he insists it’s their fault for not appreciating music. Reading one of **Leo’s** post is like listening to Porky Pig on 12 cups of coffee. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/44 "2018-06-17T04:06:51Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > The thing is, **Leo** can write in a more straightforward way when he tries to. I don’t know how much of his circumlocutionary style is just his habitual way of expressing himself, and how much is deliberate. But he’s been told for years that his style is confusing. Rather than making more of an effort to write clearly, he gets defensive and snarky when people say they don’t understand him. > [@Drunky\_Smurf](#): > > I highly disagree. > > He chooses to write in a complicated way. People constantly ask him for clarification because of the way he wrote. > > He chooses to continue to write in a complicated way. Yes, this is why it’s so annoying. If somebody has interesting things to say, I have no problem doing a bit of work to understand them if (say) English is not their first language. In fact, I find it distracting when people correct irrelevant grammatical errors in threads that are not concerned with language or writing style. But apparently Leo _can_ write quite clearly and coherently. He _chooses_ to do this. I think he feels that he has some talent as a writer, and that this convoluted gibberish has aesthetic merit. Why else _choose_ to do it? Colibri’s analogy to the talentless guy at the karaoke bar who keeps grabbing the mike is apt. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/45 "2018-06-17T04:18:50Z")
> [@kayT](#): > > Maybe if you try reading through that thread with NO PRECONCEIVED IDEAS… I have no idea what you mean by this. Do you mean approach the text without any knowledge of Leo Bloom’s posting history? Well, based on the text as written, I would be uncertain whether English was this person’s first language; I would guess that they were possibly drunk or on drugs, or had some kind of language processing deficit, perhaps caused by brain damage. Or that they were a postmodern social theorist. So, sure, I wouldn’t give somebody a hard time for these barely-coherent convolutions if it were my first encounter with them. But based on Leo Bloom’s posting history we know that he _can_ write clearly and coherently, and that he makes a deliberate choice to produce this annoying gibberish. That puts a different spin on things. ---
**Author:** ![Graymalkin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/35a633/32.png) [@Graymalkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Graymalkin)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/46 "2018-06-17T04:42:19Z")
I skip his posts. ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 6:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/47 "2018-06-17T06:30:32Z")
> [@Sunny\_Daze](#): > > It was this one: Actually no, that’s not it! It’s another one. Something about how elevators work. Went something like “so you’re there press button up up down down energy not spent?”, but much more… Bloomian. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 6:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/48 "2018-06-17T06:46:57Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > **Leo** has had feedback many many times over the years about how to write more clearly. In the thread in question, **Riemann** gave him an extensive explanation of what was wrong with his OP. **Leo** mostly put the blame on other people for failing to understand his posts, rather than trying to take any responsibility for trying to communicate better. > > **Leo** is kind of like the person who can’t sing who grabs the mike in the karaoke bar, and when people criticize his singing he insists it’s their fault for not appreciating music. This. And if it hasn’t been mentioned already, this is not **Leo** ’s first pitting. He won top spot in our [Most Indecipherable Dopers](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=828147) contest, and got [his own thread here](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=853414) when he either went off his medication or took a very powerful hallucinogenic. I think this analysis – and **Riemann** has made a similar one in the spirit of constructive criticism – is basically right; **Leo** labors under the delusion that his writing is brilliant when in fact it’s just obtuse and bizarre. That said, he’s relatively low on the annoyance scale compared to a small number of real assholes that we have trolling this board. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 6:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/49 "2018-06-17T06:52:32Z")
I find him comprehensible at times, but much less so more recently. I normally wouldn’t say I had trouble parsing the post in the OP, but it was indeed harder to read than the OP of this thread. I kinda have to translate it to normal words in my head. It reads to me like he comes up with the simple version, and then intentionally makes it fancier. Here’s basically my mental translation of part of his first post: It seems to me that the some of the OPs in Thread Games (including one where that it’is the entire point) are expecting true answers to more personal questions than before. Examples include ‘Baker’s Dozen’ and ‘Have you ever…’ The latter in particular shows what I think is a new style of post in that forum. FTR, I participate in these threads a lot. I actually enjoy that it helps me get to know more about the people here. It’s nice that we’re not always fighting. I do agree that many of this other posts are nearly indecipherable, where, even if I take the time to figure it out, I still only get the gist. I’ve always suspected he was on something when he wrote those. It sure seems that, when he writes more quickly, he does a much better job of being clear. I picture him with a thesaurus as he posts, a living embodiment of the [Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SesquipedalianLoquaciousness) trope. ---
**Author:** ![kayT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayt/32/3633_2.png) [@kayT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayT)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 11:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/50 "2018-06-17T11:42:49Z")
OK then, apparently I am outnumbered, and his posts are incomprehensible to the vast majority of people. Maybe there’s the same thing wrong in my head as in **Leo** ’s. 🙂 I hope people will let me know if I become incomprehensible, (and be a bit more gentle with me than they are with him). ---
**Author:** ![don\_t\_ask](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e68b1a/32.png) [@don\_t\_ask](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/don_t_ask)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/51 "2018-06-17T11:44:43Z")
It’s a type of citrus fruit. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/52 "2018-06-17T12:48:45Z")
> [@don\_t\_ask](#): > > It’s a type of citrus fruit. Wrong thread? Or, did you spend the entire night looking up **Leo** ’s old posts… and realized that baffling people can be fun? ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/53 "2018-06-17T14:06:11Z")
> [@kayT](#): > > OK then, apparently I am outnumbered, and his posts are incomprehensible to the vast majority of people. Maybe there’s the same thing wrong in my head as in **Leo** ’s. 🙂 I don’t know about the vast majority - I can understand him. > [@Colibri](#): > > > [@Leo Bloom](#): > > > > It seems to me that the intermittent topics within some Thread Game OPs as well as the rai·son d’ê·tre of one entire OP have become a place where posters are asked and answered more or less truthfully (if the spirit of the players is in tune with the game) regarding the in-real-life facts and opinions behind the usernames. > > What are “intermittent topics”? How is a raison d’etre a place? How can posters be both asked and answered in the same OP (or intermittent topics in the OP)? Intermittent topics are topics that pop up intermittently. A _raison d’etre_ isn’t a place - a forum is a place, and threads are places. Thread Games is a forum. Posters are both asked and answered by the nature of how the games are run - you answer the question asked in the previous post, and then ask a question of your own. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/54 "2018-06-17T14:52:27Z")
I understand what he is saying or asking. I sometimes have problems understanding why he is saying or asking it. A little creative writing in OPs is perfectly fine with me. ---
**Author:** ![Knowed\_Out](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/knowed_out/32/7380_2.png) [@Knowed\_Out](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knowed_Out)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/55 "2018-06-17T16:20:46Z")
I sometimes forget what I’m saying in mid sentence, so I try to insert generic dialog to finish out the stream of thought. Doesn’t always work. That might be what Leo is experiencing. Or, one could interpret his posts as abstract art. They don’t appeal to everybody, but a few stalwarts occasionally try to get in the artist’s mind to see if anything resonates. A good example of this is the first season of Daredevil, where Kingpin is staring at a painting in a museum that’s basically white stucco. When the curator asks why he’s so interested in the painting, he says it reminds him of childhood innocence before reality deforms it. That turns out to be augury, as the last scene of the season finale has Kingpin in jail, staring at the wall, which is also white stucco. So, maybe Leo’s rants are like a shamanistic vision of the future, but there’s too many unknowns for him to properly describe the context. He strings together partial descriptions that satisfy his personal perceptions, but no one else’s. ---
**Author:** ![VinylTurnip](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b2d939/32.png) [@VinylTurnip](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VinylTurnip)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/56 "2018-06-17T17:14:34Z")
Oh, for fuck’s sake. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/57 "2018-06-17T17:17:01Z")
> [@kayT](#): > > OK then, apparently I am outnumbered, and his posts are incomprehensible to the vast majority of people. Maybe there’s the same thing wrong in my head as in **Leo** ’s. 🙂 I hope people will let me know if I become incomprehensible, (and be a bit more gentle with me than they are with him). Let’s just say that **Leo’s** posts are far more complicated than they need to be, and that serves to confuse whatever he is trying to say. There are ambiguous referents, multiple dependent clauses, irrelevant modifiers, and ad hoc terms that he invents and have to be puzzled out. > [@Shodan](#): > > I don’t know about the vast majority - I can understand him. Intermittent topics are topics that pop up intermittently. A _raison d’etre_ isn’t a place - a forum is a place, and threads are places. Thread Games is a forum. Posters are both asked and answered by the nature of how the games are run - you answer the question asked in the previous post, and then ask a question of your own. That’s not what **Leo’s** post says. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/58 "2018-06-17T17:20:38Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > I understand what he is saying or asking. I sometimes have problems understanding why he is saying or asking it. A little creative writing in OPs is perfectly fine with me. Creative writing is fine. **Stranger on a Train** , for example, is an excellent writer. The problem is that **Leo** is an atrociously poor writer (and I say that as someone who writes for a living, and has to make sense of huge volumes of turgid prose). As I said, **Leo** is like a talentless singer who is constantly stepping up to the mike. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/59 "2018-06-17T17:20:59Z")
> [@VinylTurnip](#): > > Oh, for fuck’s sake. Well said.😉 ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2018, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203/60 "2018-06-17T18:00:44Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > Creative writing is fine. **Stranger on a Train** , for example, is an excellent writer. The problem is that **Leo** is an atrociously poor writer (and I say that as someone who writes for a living, and has to make sense of huge volumes of turgid prose). As I said, **Leo** is like a talentless singer who is constantly stepping up to the mike. I saw this after writing out a longer response to **Tripolar** ’s post, and that perfectly sums it up in a nutshell. The thing that particularly bugged me was characterizing anything that **Leo** wrote as “creative writing”. Not to belabor the point, but the hallmark of good writing is clarity. It’s not good writing if I have to go through a major parsing and decoding process to derive meaning from something that resembles a word salad, and even then sometimes not be sure if I’ve got the correct meaning. To apply the verb “understand” to the decoding and guesswork demanded by such a linguistic shambles is greatly stretching the definition of the term. And creative writing is not simply any writing that happens to be unusual or quirky. Creative writing takes skill and is characterized by careful and precise linguistic craftsmanship even more than ordinary writing. There is nothing more grating and disastrous than someone who can’t write trying to write “creatively”; the result is the archetypal Bad Poet, or the nuisance budding young novelist who plagues publishers with unintentionally hilarious manuscripts. And that’s exactly what **Leo** ’s writing reminds me of. If something can be clearly articulated in twenty words, **Leo** will use a hundred, many of them oddly jarring or imprecise or entirely inappropriate to their context, giving the impression that Leo was only dimly aware of their meaning. The result is neither readily understandable – if understandable at all – nor is it “creative” in any rational meaning of the word. As I said before, **Leo** only mildly bugs me, just kind of a strange bird. There’s far worse than him around. But a “creative writer” he’s not. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-anybody-easily-understand-leo-bloom/816203.md?page=4)