Well, I had doubted if 'modest proposal' was widely cross-culturally understood as a marker, which is why I specifically called it out in my annotations draft. (I wonder how many in the IETF could state the origins of the big/little-endian terms.) But the narrow English tradition of that marker term should not be confused with wider concept of satire itself. I did a similar search to Brian, but in google. The term does appear in e.g. https://ietf.ietf.narkive.com/cotEdgFG/too-many-notes-a-modest-proposal And in the April Fools' context: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5241.txt But, that google search also brought me: A Feminist Collective's Reaction to a Male Chauvinist Pig's Proposal: People's Proclamation of Inclusive Feminist Terminology https://www.ietf.org/staging/draft-cerfess-term-00.txt Again, that is an anonymously-authored internet draft that I didn't write. I don't know who did, and I don't want to know. I think it's entirely safe to assume that Vint didn't write it, either. Someone was quickwitted. I confess: I laughed. Lloyd Wood lloyd.wood@xxxxxxxxxxx On Monday, 5 April 2021, 07:08:51 GMT+10, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: On 05-Apr-21 08:16, Nico Williams wrote: > On Fri, Apr 02, 2021 at 07:22:53PM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote: >> Now let us come to "A Modest Proposal." >> This is not the first time that satirical essay has come up in the IETF >> context. I searched my archive. I found evidence of 10 threads, not including the recent ones, containing the phrase "a modest proposal", going back to April 1994. None of them are satirical. On that evidence, I suggest that very few IETF people have used this phrase in its Swiftian or satirical meaning. I'm not contradicting Sam, but just reporting on messages that I've chosen to archive. As I said a few days ago, I don't think that satire is very useful in our context, because it doesn't translate well and may very easily be misunderstood by non-native readers of English. Regards Brian
