[sclug] TopPosting Was: Helping others into FOSS/Linux

[Roland Turner SCLUG]

JRKnight wrote:


> Personally, I'm sick of the way so much software, as well
> as having an illogical or unintuitive user interface, has forced
> unnecessary cultural changes on us, such as:


"unnecessary cultural changes"?


Damn those Victorians and their chimney sweeps, sewers, sugar, steam
engines and railways. The world was perfectly happy before they
unneccessarily uprooted rural tranquility at home and widespread poverty
and disease abroad. Agreed, the changes were not an unalloyed good, but
does _anyone_ seriously advocate the view that the world would be a better
place if they hadn't indulged in these unneccessary cultural changes?

What about the Romans and their blasted roads and armies. Perhaps you
object to Genghis Khan's realisation that providing security in exchange
for taxes was a better bet for _all_ involved than simply raiding at will.

> (a) language errors:


Your English teachers lied to you.


The application of the terms "right" and "wrong" to diction, grammar and
spelling choices was (and is) a handy piece of emotional manipulation, but
has no grounding in any workable ethical framework that I've ever
encountered. Even the terms "correct" and "incorrect" attempt to grant to
human language characteristics that have little meaning outside of
mathematics and its applications. The work of dictionarists and
grammarians made some sense when there were a dozen printing presses in
Britain, all of them some under some degree of royal control (copyrights
were the result of explicit royal assent on a case-by-case basis, not
simply the result of creation), and even during the intense modernism of
the early Victorian era. But increasingly through that era, moreso in the
20th century as English gradually displaced French as the world's first
language and particularly now that native speakers are a small minority of
English speakers, talking about "correct" usage is both unreasonable and,
for those who view the language as a communication tool rather than a
subject of study in its own right, pointless.

(The lie that your English teachers told you includes that idea that the
usage that the dictionarists and grammarians were documenting was
"correct" or even "right", rather than merely "typical" for a particular
range of published written usage. Even so, the grammarians are having to,
umm, eat their words. Now that computers can parse much English text and
quantitative studies can be performed it emerges, for example, that,
contrary to the grammarians' protestations split infinitives - e.g. "to
boldy go" rather than "to go, boldy" - are rife even in the classics.)

>      The shortening of -ing and -tion words not only leads to
>      ambiguity (is the Iraqi 'No-Fly Zone' in fact devoid of those


Verbing wierds nouns. We know. Get over it. Nonetheless, as new ideas
enter use (and the ideas that speakers/writers choose to focus on change),
usage changes. This is not merely difficult to avoid, it is desirable.
Where would we be if the Victorians hadn't introduced thousands of words
with novel formations? (How often do you use words like maximise or
minimise? Would you prefer that these "unnecessary" changes not have come
about?)

>      insects?),  but also may reflect the loss of the abstract
>      ideas (perhaps difficult for the transatlantic/IT mindset)


Quite the contrary; to drop detail judged by the speaker/writer to be
unnecessary is the essence of abstraction.

>      which such words often represent, as computer-driven
>      typing-laziness leads us closer to Orwellian Newspeak...


I don't believe that a nett narrowing is occuring, quite the reverse in fact.


> (b) the geek-stupidity that substitutes unnecessary invented
>      abbreviations for the months of the year on rail tickets,
>      instead of the long-established ones - eg DMR for DEC.


Yeah, this seems dumb.


> (c) the irrational and confusing mm/dd/yy date format that


Not to be irrationally confused with the irrational and confusing dd/mm/yy
date format. Naturally all dates should be written yyyy-mm-dd and all
other formats are "unnecessary".

>     can appear unexpectedly in some software, and can be
>     ambiguous for at least a third of any month. Microsoft
>     started to accomodate the notations for different national
>     formats of time, date, currency etc way back in early
>     DOS,  so why do we still have to put up with the stupidity
>     of  incorrect settings - or is this another piece of cultural
>     imperialism?


Pot. Kettle. Etc.


> (d) the expression  heard, often on TV, when Web addresses
>     are being read out: "forward-slash"  for '/', when the latter is
>     just a simple slash, long-established as a division
>     sign or separator for alternatives. It is of course the
>     backslash which is anomalous, and should be named as
>     such, but Microsoft/DOS usage changed the emphasis.


Accidents of history. (Originally no sub-directories, so '/' was an
available and convenient "flag" marker and subsequently unavailable as a
hierachy seperator. Disambiguation now becomes a concern, even when it is
"unnecessary".) Usage changes over time.

> Someone will inevitably criticise all this as pedantic, but as
> Lynn Truss forgot to mention in her book: if you make the
> same kind of spelling or syntax mistakes (or even insert a
> space, in some cases) in just one line of any computer code,
> that program will either fail to run, or crash, or go horribly
> wrong in some other way.


Fortunately (most) human beings don't behave much like computer programs
(programmes? :-)).

- Raz