Hi Branden! On 10/12/22 17:52, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
Hi Alex, At 2022-10-12T16:47:27+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:In a patch to linux-man@ there's a 3-word compound adjective. I don't know what are the rules for such a thing, and I'd like to have some consistency (and correctness) in the manual pages.Always laudable goals! :D
It's very nice to read this!! :DBTW, thanks a lot for all the help these years. We finally got man-pages-6.0! :-)
I've seen many different things in the past;: a) block device-based filesystems b) block-device-based filesystems c) block- device-based filesystems And now I found one more <https://www.editorgroup.com/blog/to-hyphenate-or-not-to-hyphenate/>: d) block device\[en]based filesystems Where the en dash is used to distinguish it from 'a block filesystem based on a device'.Personally, I think the en dash is too much trouble to mess with. Only readers as meticulous as we, and those with good fonts and good eyesight, will distinguish the en dash and hyphen glyphs.Which form would you recommend me to use?Steve Izma articulated a good principle. If thrust upon the horns of a wordsmithing dilemma, consider recasting entirely.
If I find some case that I can't recast easily, I think I'll go for the preciseness and logic of en-dashes combined with hyphens, as Tadziu defended. Readers as meticulous as we with good fonts and eyesight will certainly appreciate that. And less careful readers won't care so much, but we also won't care so much about their carelessness, so not an issue. :p
That said, I'd go with "block device-based filesystems",[1] because there is no hyphen already in the noun phrase "block device", just as there isn't in "ice cream" (a compound word), and perhaps more on point, as there isn't in "hot fudge sundae" (even though it is only the fudge that is hot,[2] not the whole sundae). Similarly, we say "thirty year-old bug" and "two-fisted drinker", but
Heh! Dave caught a funny bug in this one, which supports the idea of being precise even if it's not always necessary by language rules.
"mother-in-law-driven divorce". The multiplicity of hyphens in the last
So I'd write either "divorce driven by the mother-in-law" or "mother-in-law\[en]driven divorce", depending on how nicely the first one fits.
case is because they're already present in the word being compounded. A "mother in law" would, strictly, refer to a maternal figure with an occupation in the legal system. I'd dig more into the underlying grammatical principles I would articulate for these cases but I'd prefer to get this email completed before next month. ;-)
:)
Regards,
Branden
[1] I prefer "file system" and "file name" to their space-free
alternatives; I think the latter are the product of programmers
forgetting that they're writing English nouns instead of C
identifiers. But I acknowledge that in many quarters those battles
are lost.
It seems to be lost, according to man-pages(7):
Preferred terms
The following table lists some preferred terms to use in
man pages, mainly to ensure consistency across pages.
Term Avoid using Notes
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
bit mask bitmask
built‐in builtin
Epoch epoch For the UNIX
Epoch
(00:00:00, 1
Jan 1970 UTC)
filename file name
filesystem file system
and to current use in the project:
$ grep -rn 'file system' man* | wc -l
4
$ grep -rn 'filesystem' man* | wc -l
1166
$ grep -rn 'file name' man* | wc -l
18
$ grep -rn 'filename' man* | wc -l
172
$ grep -rn 'file-system' man* | wc -l
7
$ grep -rn 'file-name' man* | wc -l
1
[2] and it's chocolate sauce anyway, not true fudge--such is marketing
honesty in the U.S.
Cheers, Alex -- <http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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