Thread: "May", "can", "might"
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
I would like to clean up our documentation to consistently use these
words. Objections?
(Who says were obsessive?) :-)
--
Bruce Momjian bruce@momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
+ If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +
"Bruce Momjian" <bruce@momjian.us> writes: > (Who says were obsessive?) :-) I may not fall into your clever trap... -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
On 1/30/07, Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com> wrote: > > "Bruce Momjian" <bruce@momjian.us> writes: > > > (Who says were obsessive?) :-) > > I may not fall into your clever trap... But you certainly can! <cymbal_crash/> (sorry...) > > -- > Gregory Stark > EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate > subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@postgresql.org so that your > message can get through to the mailing list cleanly > -- Mike Rylander mrylander@gmail.com GPLS -- PINES Development Database Developer http://open-ils.org
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruce Momjian" <bruce@momjian.us> -- snip -- > I would like to clean up our documentation to consistently use these > words. Objections? > > (Who says were obsessive?) :-) -- more snip --Did you mean, "Who says we're obsessive?" ;-)Sean
Bruce Momjian a écrit : > Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways: > > may - permission, "You may borrow my rake." > > can - ability, "I can lift that log." > > might - possibility, "It might rain today." > > Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as > in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better > choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash". > > I would like to clean up our documentation to consistently use these > words. Objections? > No objections at all... it can only ease translations. > (Who says were obsessive?) :-) > :) -- Guillaume. <!-- http://abs.traduc.org/ http://lfs.traduc.org/ http://docs.postgresqlfr.org/ -->
I have made these adjustments to the documentation. Do people want the error message strings also updated? It will probably make the translation easier/clearer in the future, but it does involve some error message wording churn. CVS HEAD only, of course. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- bruce wrote: > Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways: > > may - permission, "You may borrow my rake." > > can - ability, "I can lift that log." > > might - possibility, "It might rain today." > > Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as > in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better > choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash". > > I would like to clean up our documentation to consistently use these > words. Objections? > > (Who says were obsessive?) :-) > > -- > Bruce Momjian bruce@momjian.us > EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com > > + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. + -- Bruce Momjian bruce@momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +
Bruce Momjian wrote: > I have made these adjustments to the documentation. Do people want > the error message strings also updated? I have no problem with that. They seem to be in pretty good shape already, so the changes should be few. -- Peter Eisentraut http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/
> I have made these adjustments to the documentation. Do people want the > error message strings also updated? It will probably make the > translation easier/clearer in the future, but it does involve some error > message wording churn. CVS HEAD only, of course. I think most translations will have the intended meaning translated correctly. So I think we can leave the translations unchanged in most cases, and only change the english original. Maybe this can be automated ? But since it only seems to be very few this might not be necessary. (e.g. I only see 1 wrong "may" in psql) Andreas
Bruce Momjian schrieb: > I have made these adjustments to the documentation. Do people want the > error message strings also updated? It will probably make the > translation easier/clearer in the future, but it does involve some error > message wording churn. CVS HEAD only, of course. I still think logging localized error message is a bad idea anayway. Nothing wrong with a frontend client to respond with localized messages but logfiles with localized errors are hard or next to impossible to parse. (Let allone quoting it on mailing lists) So, changes of the wording could break such applications anyway but not unexpected :-) Regards Tino
Peter Eisentraut wrote: > Bruce Momjian wrote: > > I have made these adjustments to the documentation. Do people want > > the error message strings also updated? > > I have no problem with that. They seem to be in pretty good shape > already, so the changes should be few. Yea, I see only a few. I will update those. -- Bruce Momjian bruce@momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +
On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 12:39:26PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote: > I would like to clean up our documentation to consistently use these > words. Objections? None here, but if you're going to go to the trouble, you might want to have a look at how others have faced this problem too. In my line of work, we've taken to adopting the RFC 2119 words for cases where we want to be super-clear and unambiguous. I don't think those formulations would be much use for user manuals, but it's nice to see that another group of people who work by converging on consensus can still do that by (for example) agreeing that "MAY" and "may" are not the same word. A -- Andrew Sullivan | ajs@crankycanuck.ca The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. --George Orwell