Elegance is bullshit.

Suits for interviews. Combed hair for dates. Makeup to feel prettier. And, most cruelly, the English language to feel meaningful.

“Clear prose lends authority—even to weak ideas.” – George Orwell, Politics and the English Language.
Sophistication can hide truth.

Why do we ponder over sentences that rearrange words into appealing order,

An ice cube melts with quiet discipline, surrendering its edges before its core, shaping the drink long before flavor has a chance to speak. Even in something so small, form decides outcome.

and disregard sentences as meaningless when they sound disorderly and bland?

Climate change is killing people. I am upset when people die. I want polar bears to live longer.

Carefully constructed ideas compel us to think and allow us to dive deeper into the ideas the author is showcasing. If this distinction is taken at face value, it makes sense. But looking at it from afar, it begins to sound ridiculous. Are we incapable of making mental breakthroughs if the text does not give us a hint of sophistication? Presented a meaningful topic, we should not need linguistic beauty to care. Yet we do.

Is tradition what binds us to painstaking formality when writing an email? If the conventions of emailing vanished overnight, would I write “wassuh Karen, may you give me an extension on the project, thanks” and hit send? Or would the lack of polish itself feel like a violation, independent of the request?

At this point, the reader may be confused. A collection of loosely connected sentences proving what?

This essay is half self-disgust, at how easily I am seduced by beautiful nonsense, and half a complaint against a culture that mistakes elegance for truth.

Understand what is important to you. Trust your thinking. Focus on your brain. Fight society’s obsession with polish. Show up to the interview with a T-shirt and explain the intricacies of the Riemann Hypothesis.

Elegance is makeup that hides the scars of battle.
Sometimes it hides the battle entirely.