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From: | Lennart Borgman (gmail) |
Subject: | Re: Fix UK spelling in comments and ChangeLog entries? |
Date: | Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:59:22 +0200 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071031 Thunderbird/2.0.0.9 Mnenhy/0.7.5.666 |
David Kastrup wrote:
"Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <address@hidden> writes:Alan Mackenzie wrote:Hi, Kenichi, On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 09:16:25PM +0900, Kenichi Handa wrote:Anyway, for me (a non native English speeker), the more helpful thing is to standardise which word to use (e.g. remove/delete, replace/substitute, accept/permit/allow, preserve/retain, put/set/store, property/attribute, vector/array, go-to/move-to, cancel/undo, etc.) :-pNO!! Different words have different meanings. For example, if you delete something, it's gone. If you remove something, you can later put it back again. You might substitute a fresh football player for a tired one, but you'd replace a broken light bulb (answer, it only takes one Emacs hacker to change a light bulb). And so on. There a few pairs of words indeed in English in which one means exactly the same as the other. It is surely the same in other languages. Let us strive, always, to use the most fitting word, and to preserve and retain the fine control this gives us over our meanings.That is nice. For some non native English speakers it would be good to have a document describing those small differences.Uh no, it is not nice. The poetry of Emacs is at a different level than the poetry of drama. The language of documentation should be blunt and to the point. We don't want to hide differences in the subtlety of words.
Maybe you are right, but I think different words can both hide and point to the differences. For me personally it would help. I do not think that logically, it takes too much time except at that point when you have to be exact.
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