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here is a link to the mark twain short: http://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/humor/marktwain.cfm.

on a serious note, mark twain was a member of the simplified spelling board (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board) which was funded by Andrew Carnegie, who probably was the founder of a University or library or arts centre near u. He was a good man looking to improve things and one of his goals was to fix/improve the english language problem. With the advent of mass communication of all classes of people online... we r finally getting around to fixing these issues that we were unable to solve back then.

For example, Chip $foo has functions A B C D E & F. E is used on average once every gigaflop, so using the CPU/other functions, they implement E and cut out all parts for E.

The best part is that this can be applied iteratively. Once E is eliminated there's a new "least used" function which can be eliminated. By extension, any CPU can ultimately be pruned down to a single NOP instruction, with the entire rest of the instruction set emulated in software.

Not quite to THAT degree, but Mark Twain suggested something along those lines: http://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/humor/marktwain.cfm I'll leave it to the reader to provide a coding sample to implement this.

I think Mark Twain found your ideas intriguing, and may have subscribed to your news letter.

It's fun though, isn't it?

Did you ever see How to Write Good?

Extended glyph copy and paste error:
http://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/humor/marktwain.cfm

Too true. If you write in normal speech, you quickly have problems. Many words are just plain ambiguous. Even in technical specifications, it's something that has to be dealt with: if you're comparing two things for equality, what happens if one string has a precomposed Unicode character and the other one has the combining characteristics? Should the "K" (Kelvin sign glyph) and the "K" (Latin upper-case K) be considered equal?

Plain language is almost always hopelessly ambiguous. Most legalese is actually very readable if you have a bit of practice.

Not totally true. They are doing something about it.

Absolutely agreed. Here is a nice site on the subject of the use of plain language in government.

Most of the hard SF writers did/do. Niven, Asimov, etc... They also know how to write for people. Wikipedia has some great science articles, but they are written for people in the field and suffer from some incestuous language barrier. I have yelled at a friend for one of his articles, but he also was kinda of a self-centered prick in high school. (Still love you Dave and you know I am right) I have an very good grasp of both health care business law in the US and economics, but the articles over such sections read like alien speach because they are so jargon filled. This is comming from a guy who knows the jargon. Try to rewrite them and you get a whole bunch of flack about dumbing down. People need to look into writing in Plain Language.