Hi Branden, On Tue, Feb 20, 2024 at 10:36:11AM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > Hi Alex, > > At 2024-02-20T16:24:01+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > > [Off-topic; just language curiosity; feel free to ignore] > > [no worries] I was preventing other innocent readers, who might not be aware of how much we enjoy such converations. :) > > That's also taught in Spanish high school. The Spanish word is > > "actual" too, which means current. > > Oy vey. I've got more training in Spanish than any other non-English > language, and never hit that one. > > I raised this point because it was (mis-)used repeatedly in groff > documentation and I had to clean it up. It was then that I learned that > this specific solecism is frequent in technical writing where there is > multinational collaboration. And you're probably right. [...] > > Some other dictionaries don't acknowledge this meaning, and claim it's > > a mistake. Do you know who is right about it? I fear some dictionaries > > might be ahistorically removing that meaning. Even if that meaning > > wasn't the main one, it probably was correct some time in the future. Huh! I meant s/future/past/ > > I'd like to see some investigation showing history of that meaning > > before claiming it's wrong. I rather call out the Cambridge dictionary > > and others as being wrong. > > I'm not sufficiently credentialed to argue with published dictionaries, > but I will offer that the use of "present" in these definitions has to > be understood in context, and note should be take of the one we're using > here. When discussing software, implementations sometimes don't match > specifications--documented behavior may not be reflected in code. > > So when we encounter the phrase "in the actual version", one can infer > that a description is being offered in contrast to some non-actual > version; perhaps some change of intention occurred in the passage from > design document or bug report to the code as written. > > But, in my experience, most of the time when we see "in the actual > version", all the (typically non-native) speaker is trying to impart is > a temporal statement about the present (or near-present) situation, not > drawing a contrast between intentions elsewhere document and actuality. Agree. For documentation, we better write unambiguous English, and not just correct English. > > Returning to your examples: > > > 3. In action at the time being; now exiting; present; as the > > actual situation of the country. > > Contrast: > > "The Central Committee of the Communist Party reported that per capita > intake of nutritional calories in Ukraine in 1933 was 13% higher than in > England." > > If a historian were to offer some perspective on that claim, their use > of the word "actual" would be contrasting reality with assertion more > strongly than it would be nailing down a temporal datum. > > Similarly: > > > 5: being or existing at the present moment; "the ship's actual > > position is 22 miles due south of Key West" > > "The ship's reported position was 5 miles southwest of Bahía de los > Cochinos." > > The contrast between "reported" and "actual" here is a more > significant factor than "at the present moment". Given enough time, a > ship could move from one location to the other, just as an API can > change over time; but when we use "actual", our emphasis is not on > temporal matters even though we often need some temporal information to > decide the truth of a claim. > > Does this clarify? Yup. "actual" may be actually correct as a synonymous of "current", but it's more ambiguous actually than it might have been a long time ago, so we better avoid it in documentation. :) Have a lovely day! Alex > For more along these lines, I highly recommend Jeremy Gardner's document > "Misused English words and expressions in EU Publications". > > https://www.eca.europa.eu/other%20publications/en_terminology_publication/en_terminology_publication.pdf > > Regards, > Branden -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/> Looking for a remote C programming job at the moment.
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