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One of the problems of the current era is the abundance of words. There are too many of them. Therefore, the skills of attentive and correct reading are rapidly being lost. No, what is said directly and repeated ten times is still understood. But problems have become almost insurmountable when it comes to what is NOT SAID. First, the culture of allusion was lost. When something is left unsaid in a text, and the very fact of this omission is part of the message. As long as there were few words, the reader gratefully delved into it – what does this passage indicate, why is it abruptly broken off here, why is an obvious conclusion from the premises not stated? No, not even delved into – they felt it. Receiving exquisite pleasure from such a watercolor. Now, all of this can be safely forgotten. At least in texts that do not claim to be artistic, but rather about "thoughts and ideas." Everything needs to be written down to the end, scratching out every detail and dwelling on any banality. On the other hand, people have somehow completely stopped being ashamed of "mental digressions." That is, false moves that take you outside the author's thought. No one considers that the author said ONLY what he said. No, they come up with things for him – and not what the author would like them to come up with or guess (see above about allusion), but what the reader has imagined out of habit. Usually, this leads them straight into some kind of mess or snowdrift, from which they then curse the vile author, who supposedly put them in this snowdrift. However, these assumptions can be predicted. Because, as a rule, they follow the line of "the author said something stupid" or "the author said something nasty." Since it is not difficult to figure out what specific stupidities or nastiness can be derived from a particular statement, one has to protect oneself by saying in advance – "do not misunderstand me in such and such a way." That is, before, one could write something like "not the first consonant letter." The reader would probably guess that it means the letter "v." Now, you need to write directly – "the letter V," without any ambiguity, you understand. And tomorrow, it will be desirable to express yourself like this – "the letter V, and not G, no, not G, and not D, and not Zh, I repeat, not Zh, because you are only thinking about Zh, so it's not Zh, and not all the other letters of the alphabet, but specifically V, V, remember, V... yes, I remind you – and not a vowel, not a vowel!!!" Or, here's a more realistic example. Before, one could allow oneself a metaphor like: "poverty is a bottomless barrel." Now, you need to say: "as practice shows, charity helps individual poor people for a short time, but poverty as a phenomenon does not disappear from this." And tomorrow, you will definitely have to add – "I do not mean by this that charity should not be done at all, that it is wrong to refuse unfortunate widows a penny, while we ourselves gorge ourselves and revel! I also did not mean to say that all the poor should be gathered in concentration camps and burned in furnaces! I did not mean that they are to blame for their own poverty, no, it happens in different ways, I know that! nothing in this text is aimed at inciting hatred and hostility towards the less well-off segments of the population, damn it!" This is very annoying, and sometimes infuriating. But alas. Yes, and by the way. I did not mean that people have become stupider, that they have forgotten how to read, or that they have gone mad. I also did not want to say that there are many malicious cretins and assholes around, picking at words, although there are such people. I only meant that, due to a combination of objective and subjective reasons, more responsibility is placed on the author than before, damn it.