> : ) I choose not to be offended, thank you LOL.
>Can you please explain what you mean by form and
>function?

Certainly. Imagine, if you will, a PC with its case on nice and tight, all the cords neatly collected and tied off in the back so as not to tangle with anything, and no dust at all anywhere near it. Imagine further that this PC, for all it's wonderful looks, is a crappy old 286 running DOS 3.3

Now imagine a PC with its case off, exposing all its inards, its cables flying every which way out the back and running along the baseboards, and the case itself looking like a grease monkey handled it before washing his hands. Imagine further that this PC is a Pentium 233 MMX running Linux/Win 98.

Which PC would you rather have? Well, if you know absolutely nothing about computers, you might choose the neat one, because it looks nicer. If you know enough about computers to know how useless the first computer is, you'll probably want the second one, knowing you could probably tie back all those unruly wires and put the case back on (and clean it up.)

But what if you couldn't do that, for some reason? What if the case had to be off, and the wires a mess, and the grease stains all over the front? Would you still take the better computer?

Well, I would, because I know it doesn't matter one bit what a computer looks like on the outside, it's what it does inside that counts. I'm not going to get the performance I want out of the "neat" computer, so I'm going to take the cruddy one every time. In fact, the description I gave of the cruddy computer very closely matches the description of my own computer which I am using now, with the exception of the grease stains (I added those as an artistic touch.)

Some people, however, wouldn't do that. They couldn't bring themselves to bring that crappy looking thing into their nice houses. They'd either take the lesser computer, or wouldn't take either, choosing instead to find another computer elsewhere (which, after all, might be the sane thing to do--but that's beside the point entirely for the moment. Let's limit our thinking to the case where you *have* to choose one or the other.)

That's putting form over function. Perhaps a better example is clothing. The function of clothing is to keep the elements away and cover all of my "naughty" parts. As long as my clothing does that, I really don't care what it looks like. Some people, however, will spend hours pairing shirts with pants, or blouses with skirts, trying to find the "perfect" match that they can wear, and they wouldn't dream of putting on a blue shirt with brown pants, or wearing white shoes after Labor Day. That is also putting form over function.

I once had a roomate who had a stereo receiver, and wanted to buy a CD player. He scouted the market, boned up on the functions and features of the various CD players, and finally decided on a make and model of CD player that he really wanted. So he went down to the local Circuit City and found it. Unfortunately, the only example of this model they had there had round buttons, while his receiver had square buttons. He refused to buy it.

That CD player would have sounded just *exactly* the same as one with square buttons. There was absolutely no difference internally. Yet he couldn't bring himself to buy the one with round buttons because it wouldn't match his receiver. That's putting form over function. Is it wrong? Of course not, unless you let it get totally out of hand. But for me, I usually find it impossible to put form over function. Function *always* comes first, and then, if I think about at all, I'll consider form.

When talking about writing, what I mean when I say "he puts form over function" is that the author is more concerned with things like how the words fit on the page, or how they flow, or the meter of his blank verse, or various other elements of "style", and less concerned with the meat-and-potatoes of story telling, such as plot and characterization.

Get it now? :-)