Language Log

I follow a similar approach but maybe more extreme : whenever possible, I use "YESTERDAY'S TECHNOLOGY TOMORROW"

It's nicely presented on http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000606.html

> I want yesterday's technology tomorrow. I want old things that have stood the test of time and are designed to last so that I will still be able to use them tomorrow. I don't want tomorrow's untested and bug-ridden ideas for fancy new junk made available today because although they're not ready for prime time the company has to hustle them out because it's been six months since the last big new product announcement. Call me old-fashioned, but I want stuff that works.

The same thing is true with free software: I prefer to use the terminal. In the terminal, I prefer to run bash and vim, not zsh and neovim.

When I write code, I've found C (and perl!) to be preferable, because "You can freeze it for a year and then pick it back up right where you left off."

There are rare exceptions, when what's new is so much better than the previous solution (ex: Wayland) that it makes sense to move.

However, that should be rare, and you should be very sure. If you think you made the wrong choice, you can always move back to your previous choice: after playing with ZFS for a few years, I'm moving some volumes back to NTFS.

Someone mentions how the author choice (python2) is getting harder to install. Cold blooded software works best when done with multiplatform standards, so I'd suggest…

Perhaps.

Grammar pedants (prescriptivists), seem to be made up mostly of people who've come to the conclusion that the particular mode of the language they're most comfortable with is the "correct" one that everybody should be communicating in. It seems to come from some deep-down inflexibility to tolerate or comprehend that other people communicate in different modes. The pedant seems to wish that all the world should structure their communication to be most convenient for them rather than trying to work on increasing the scope of the modes they can work with. They believe there is one kind of audience and their preferred mode is the magical key that ensures correct and precise communication with that audience -- regardless if this is actually true.

It makes a kind of sense that this might stem from some deep seated introversion -- people for whom the principal interaction between audience and speaker is themselves. But on the other hand, wouldn't you likely be able to understand any mode of communication within your own mind?

What's most often fascinating to me is how deeply wrong and ignorant of grammar most grammar pedants are beyond some superficially memorized rules they've attached themselves to. When pushed for the "why" behind their rules they frequently don't know, or will point to some style manual (usually also full of grammar errors) they believe has taken on an almost holy quality.

One of my favorite tactics is the "that's not a word" argument, with fingers…

Some good commentary (from syntacticians) is here:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3809

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001192.html

The first link is by one of the authors of CGOTEL, and comes out strongly against calling that were-form subjunctive; the second link is by another syntactician, and is a little more ambivalent.

What follows is a mixture of (a) my understanding of some terminology and facts, and (b) my interpretation of the arguments:

"Subjunctive" is a label for a type of sentence mood, where "mood" has to do with the relationship between the sentence and reality. Subjunctive mood is usually, like indicative and imperative moods, marked on the verb. (In my mind, interrogative is also a mood, but it is usually marked on the sentence, not on the verb.) Indicative and imperative moods have fairly narrow commonly-agreed semantics, but subjunctive is more of a catchall (my second link above will warn of the danger of confusing syntactic terminology with semantics, but while they don't correspond perfectly, they are related). We can quickly note that "if I were a rich man", a counterfactual clause, easily fits into area that can be covered by a "subjunctive" mood in various languages.

It's widely agreed that the following construction in English should be called "subjunctive":

I ask that you be polite to him.

The subjunctive form of "be" is so distinct from any other finite form that it makes for good examples. Any time a finite…

Other than a few synthetic languages, that true of every other language, so I don't understand why you are singling out English.

Well, I guess there are a few language academies which try to define a language, but those are post hoc. If you accept that, then I can declare myself the explicit definer of English language, no?

I can say that the past tense of "to God" is "to Gods", but English has a general rule that the "d"/"ed" form usually forms the past, while "s" is used for third person singular present tense. (There are exceptions, of course.)

I could say that in Swedish "att Gud" is conjugated in the present as "att Gudo", but Swedish has a pretty strong rule that present tense verbs ends with an -r. The exception being the modals and archaic forms like "äro" in the song "Vi äro, musikanter".

Tossing the 'explicitly defined grammar' aside, which is the realm of the prescriptivists, we're still left with the meaning of rule used by the descriptivists. What are those rules? In terms you use, what are the rules which describe what "other people will naturally agree with."

In case you couldn't tell, I'm a descriptivist, in the Language-Log-fanboi sort of way. Quoting from http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3985 :

> Bloom finishes with some more invective against "these do-as-you-please linguists" who pretend that "utopia is at hand, that everyone is a revolutionary, that linguistic anarchy will set you free." I would love to meet one of these anarcho-linguists,…

Have you read any of the criticism of the book? Its Wikipedia entry quotes Pullum:

> The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules ... It's sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write however or than me or was or which, but can't tell you why.

(See also "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" at, eg, https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-file-manager/file/5bd889926431f1de07115e6e/209-50-Years-of-stupid-grammar-advice.pdf . Language Log recommends https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Strunk+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fitre.cis.upenn.edu%2F%7Emyl%2Flanguagelog&btnG=Google+Search&gws_rd=ssl as a way to find further criticism from them.)

For "Omit needless words", a problem is identifying what "needless" means. Quoting http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004552.html:

> Whenever you see an appeal to ONW, you should wonder what people are doing with those "needless" words. Most of the time, those extra words are serving some function that conflicts with brevity; they're doing some work.

There are also examples how that phrase (likely) caused people to believe that if a word can be omitted…

Because it's not all that great. It's the C Programming Language of linguistic style guides—well-respected and historically relevant, but not necessarily the best resource.

For example, The Elements of Style tells you to avoid the passive voice, on the grounds that sentences like "The sandwich was eaten by me," are much more awkward than "I ate the sandwich." It gives three sentences in support of this: "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground," "It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had," and "The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired." None of these sentences actually contain a passive: the first is an existential sentence, the second is a simple copula, and the third uses the copula with an adjective, not a participle.[1]

All of which is to say—Strunk and White did not know what a passive was. The actual advice they meant to give is something along the lines of, "Don't be vague about agency," but that is a different proscription. There are places where you should avoid the passive, and there are also places where you should employ the passive, because it is clearer than the alternative. For example, if your documentation says, "Our software product is used to [blah]", you should not change it to, "People use our software product to [blah]," because those people do not matter. By avoiding the passive, you have made your writing less clear by introducing unnecessary information.

Strunk and…