On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 01:04:00PM -0400, Mark Jason Dominus wrote:
> > I was struck by one of my own: exempli gratia being abbreviated to eg or
> > eg., rather than e.g.
>
> I would like to suggest that Latin is obscure, and latin abbreviations
> are doubly obscure. There is no space constraint that should require
> us to use "e.g." in place of "for example". Using "i.e." in place of
> "that is" is even sillier. (57% sillier, in fact.)
>
> If you're going to do the work of locating these locutions, can I
> suggest that you get rid of the unnecessary abbreviations entirely?
I'm going to come at this from a different angle. One that says "leave it
as ie/eg" or perhaps simply "who cares?" because the effort to correct all
the ie's and eg's and it's and [ae]ffects just doesn't seem worth the effort.
I will quote Donald Norman.
What about noon: How shall it be labeled, AM or PM? In a clever essay on
the topic, the engineer Henry Petroski argues that 12 noon should be labeled
12M, for after all, the history of AM and PM is that they mean Ante
Meridiem ("before the middle of the day") and Post Meridiem ("after midday").
Noon is the meridiem, the midday, so it is neither before nor after. It
should be labeled M: 12M.
Yikes! That is putting principle first, and damn the consequences. I hate
to disagree so strongly with one of my favorite authors, but I splutter at
the thought of using M to mark noon in order to distinguish it from midnight!
In English, if any letter is to be used to denote noon, it should be N.
M ought to stand for midnight.
The mark of "M" for noon makes historical sense, but it makes practical
sense only if the everyday user of time understands the original meanings
of the terms AM and PM.
"How Long Is Noon?" published in "Turn Signals Are The Facial
Expressions Of Automobiles" p 89
The point being, most people don't know that "P.M.", "i.e." and "e.g." are
abbreviations for Latin phrases so it doesn't matter one bit to the reader
of the Perl documentation whether its "ie" or "i.e.". While neither option
causes confusion, as 12M for 12 noon does, neither one adds anything over the
other except perhaps niggling grammatical correctness.
What it does add is MAINTENANCE COST. Maintaining an extreme level
of grammatical correctness and consistency over a large collection with
multiple authors takes time and effort not just from the person doing the
initial grammar fix but from all the CPAN authors who now have to reapply
that patch and retrain their writing style. Not to mention all the
mailing list noise it inevitably generates (remember the [ae]ffect thread?)
Effort is spent with a near 0 benefit to the user.
While I thank you very much for the effort to scan the documentation to find
grammar nits, and I realize Open Source is about scratching an itch, software
is about change management. Which is why I say to stop fiddling with the
(ie/i.e.)'s, the (eg/e.g.)'s, the (its/it's)'s and the ([ae]ffects).
There's FAR more important things to be done in the Perl documentation.
--
Michael G Schwern [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pobox.com/~schwern
ROCKS FALL! EVERYONE DIES!
http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp05032002.shtml
