[geeks] KDE "konsole" cluebat?

[velociraptor]

On 4/16/07, Micah R Ledbetter <vlack-lists at vlack.com> wrote:
> der Mouse wrote:
>
> > (There's a place for descriptive authority, but a reference for
> > correctness is not it.)  I was taught by a very strict old-school
> > grammarian, and ended up with a position somewhat like Nero Wolfe's:
> > describing sloppy usage does not render it correct.
>
> The problem with your position is that you assume there is "correct" and
> "incorrect". There is no "wrong way" to express something, as long as
> the something was successfully expressed or communicated (depending on
> the situation).
>
> What is incorrect about successful communication?

While I generally agree with Micah, you can successfully communicate
and still not give the impression you'd like.  It's a balancing act.
Like the scene in _My Cousin Vinnie_ where Joe Pesci is taken to task
by the southern judge about his thick Jersey accent, ("yoots,
yeroner")--some language is appropriate in some situations and not in
others.  Hence my statement about intent--you have to consider your
intended communication from the point of view of the audience as well
as your own, because it's the communicator's responsibility to get the
message across in a way that meets both criteria.

You cannot account 100% for the biases, understanding, etc. of the
audience, but as a communicator it's your job to do your best to "read
their minds" before you put your writing or speech out there.

It's not about "correctness" per se, it's about the measure of success
as defined by the writer's audience, in my opinion.

Much software documentation, for example, is quite successful of
documenting all the options of all the menus in the application, but
fails horrendously at the job of context, never explaining *why* a
user might want those options.  (KDE, natch.)  I'd call this a failure
of audience analysis rather than a failure to communicate--they
successfully imparted a message, just not the one the audience wanted.

Another example--on roombareviews.com, there's a fellow who is
obviously an engineer.  He's meticulously documented the
disassembly/reassembly, fixes, etc. of Roomba robots--but clearly with
an audience of other engineers in mind.  I can't fault him--he did the
whole thing for free with annotated pictures and the whole nine yards.
 But, really, that's not the audience that's reading his stuff, so
he'd likely get a great deal more positive feedback if he'd have
approached it from the viewpoint of a non-engineer working on the
things.

By the same token, you don't discuss the solution to a computer
problem with a non-technical person the same way you do with another
*NIX admin.  You guage their understanding of the problem and adapt
the presentation of the message in a way that they can understand and
retain.

But calling such shifts "sloppy" just because they might disregard
formal rules is short-sighted in my mind.  Old school grammarians are
just that--old.  Language evolves faster than many are willing to
accept.  Nothing wrong with their usuage, but they are unrealistic at
best if they think the rest of the world's is going to allow language
to be set in stone.  We'd all be speaking something older than
Sumerian if that was the case.

=Nadine=