On 02/01/2013 08:16 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
On 02/01/2013 04:52 PM, Craig White wrote:
It's clear that you want this e-mail list, informal as it is to respect
your sense of proper grammar.
No, it's not "his sense of proper grammar," it's proper grammar as
it's been taught in schools in every English speaking country for over
a century now.
As I see it, there are three reasons people's grammar on this list
falls short. This is an international list and not all of the members
have English as their first (or even second) language. My attitude is
that they're doing the best they can and as long as I can work out
what they originally meant, that's all that matters. Second, there are
native English speakers who either were never taught properly in
school (I have a friend who has trouble with homonyms, using "flue"
for "flew" and other such errors because of problems when she was
young.) And, of course, there are the people who were exposed to
proper grammar, syntax and word usage but simply don't care. On some
mailing lists, people in both of the latter two groups would be flamed
for their errors. On this one, I keep my opinions to myself because I
can't see any way it could possibly help and many ways it could end up
making trouble for everybody.
Back in the days on some IETF lists we had a Japanese professor who's
English was phenomenally good and would flame native speakers on their
grammer. Of course the gentleman could not speak a clear word of
English (and still can't when I occationally meet up with him) which we
all put up with as his genius really fixed a number of protocols that
just were not going right. There are a number of protocols you here use
all the time that we would still be reving if he had not gotten up in a
meeting and said, "here is how we should do this".
Now, of course, we're in a long, OT discussion of the issue and I
think that if nothing else, it's let all of us who don't like bad
grammar to air our opinions instead of bottling them up as we'd
normally do. No, I don't expect this to result in any change, but who
knows; somebody might decide to be more careful because they'd never
realized how it looks to others.
--
users mailing list
users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe or change subscription options:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
