I encountered a sentence today that derailed my train of thought, and forced me into an afternoon of quietly pondering the meanings of T. S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton. That culpable sentence is simply this: “The title is a concise, but sometimes imprecise, description of the rule”. It’s from the second paragraph of the introduction to a coding standard for the C programming language, available here. In the realm of software development, coding standards (and the rules therein) are often the saviour of programmers, but they are also utterly banal rest of the time. This particular standard is closer to the former, I think, as it relates to the security and fortification of programs written in C. It goes without saying, at this point, that I have yet to fully read said coding standard, as I am still wandering the kingdom of poetry following the derailment today.

What that sentence provoked in me were the penetrating ideas that Eliot expressed in the final part of Burnt Norton. “Words move”, wrote Eliot, “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still”. Although this poem is a deeply religious meditation by Eliot, it nonetheless lends itself to a secular interpretation, particularly in the isolated context of words and meanings. I first read it a few years ago. Since then I’ve enjoyed revisiting it to learn anew its concise evocation of the imprecise character of words. To that end, the triggering sentence that I quoted earlier captures my view of this poem beautifully: concise, but imprecise.

The dictionary definitions of concise and imprecise are not quite polar opposites, but not too far off either. I suppose conciseness is synonymous with succinctness, or even compactness. So it’s really about length (or lack thereof), more than the precision of meaning. Hence imprecision can coexist in harmony with concision. Poets appear to understand this better than the rest of us. Indeed, one may argue that that’s what a poem is: concise, but imprecise.

It’s curious that programming connects to poems, at least while mired aboard an enigmatic train of thought in my mind - easy, it is, to put a finger on; difficult, it is, to express in words. Perhaps Yoda would say it more concisely, though not more precisely. As Eliot pointed out, words “will not stay still” when we are trying to put a finger on “the still point of the turning world”. I like to state this as the Uncertainty Principle for natural languages, which postulates that a thought translated into words becomes irreducibly fuzzy.

Now, admittedly, that’s a heinously arrogant assertion. Who am I to contend that the writings throughout the ages, and by the sages, are not both concise and precise? Whatever the predilection one happens to possess, it’s hard to envisage the unambiguous expression of a thought in words when contrasting the networked structure of thoughts with the simpler, tree-like structure of words and sentences. This, indeed, is the curious link between programming and poems. Steven Pinker’s books on language explain this very well - most recently he had an excellent chapter about this in The Sense of Style (2014). The gist of it is that a network (or web) contains more information than its corresponding tree (technical term is a spanning tree). Consequently, something must get lost when translating a web into a tree, when expressing a thought in words, or when compressing a bit to it. Concision begets imprecision, and it is forever thus.