Thread: Doc patch "only relevant" -> "relevant only"

Hi,

As long as I'm sending in trivial fixes
to the docs here's a bit of wording that's been bugging me.

In a number of places the docs read "only relevant",
this patch reverses this to read "relevant only".

I believe this reads better because it quickly
answers the question "is what?" with "is relevant",
making the sentence less of a strain to read.
"Only relevant" would be better if you really wanted
to emphasize the "only", which I don't think is called
for.

(Sending in such trivial patches makes me feel like
I'm bikeshedding.  Feel free to ignore them without comment.)

Regards,

Karl <kop@meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                 -- Robert A. Heinlein

On 10/16/2012 11:24 PM, Karl O. Pinc wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As long as I'm sending in trivial fixes
> to the docs here's a bit of wording that's been bugging me.
>
> In a number of places the docs read "only relevant",
> this patch reverses this to read "relevant only".
>
> I believe this reads better because it quickly
> answers the question "is what?" with "is relevant",
> making the sentence less of a strain to read.
> "Only relevant" would be better if you really wanted
> to emphasize the "only", which I don't think is called
> for.
>
> (Sending in such trivial patches makes me feel like
> I'm bikeshedding.  Feel free to ignore them without comment.)
>
>

This doesn't appear to correct any ambiguity, nor any grammatical error. 
I find these sentences perfectly readable as they are. Not everything in 
the docs conforms to my personal style either, but I'm not in favor of 
taking this sort of patch which is just a matter of substituting your 
stylistic judgment for that for the original author. If we do that we'll 
never stop.

cheers

andrew

At 2012-10-17 09:19:58 -0400, andrew@dunslane.net wrote:
>
> This doesn't appear to correct any ambiguity, nor any grammatical
> error.

FWIW, it's quite standard and uncontroversial "good writing" advice to
push "only" as far right as it can go. It does correct an ambiguity,
but in this case the ambiguity is silly and harmless, so fixing it
seems like nitpicking when you read the patch.

-- Abhijit

P.S. I would fix it anyway.

On Tue, 2012-10-16 at 22:24 -0500, Karl O. Pinc wrote:
> In a number of places the docs read "only relevant",
> this patch reverses this to read "relevant only".

committed