Category: language

You Need Verbs: Saying What Computers Do

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Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Bad documentation says what things are. Good documentation says what they do.

The widespread contempt for grammar in society is one of my numerous hobby horses. In school I got the impression that grammar was about diagramming sentences and placing commas. They told us that certain constructs are incorrect, but these were presented as arbitrary societal rules which serve no other purpose than to demonstrate education and get into a good college. Since this was in the 1980’s and conforming to arbitrary societal rules were seen as uncool and silly, grammar was uncool and silly.

What they did not tell us was that not only do words have meaning, but gramatical constructs have meaning too and sometimes if you use the wrong one you will not be understood. This is not always a problem in the situations of daily life since most people know what you meant to say.

But computers are complicated and very flexible. The way software works can be difficult to explain and not entirely obvious. If you are writing the manual but don’t have the grammatical chops to pull it off, your readers can be left guessing. You need to explain how data moves through a system, what steps are taken in what order. You do not need to be a grammar expert, but you need to know how to express ideas clearly, so say the data “enters” something, “is collected” from some places, that it “passes through”. You need to know how to say that one thing was replaced with another without mixing up the old and the new thing.

So pay attention to grammar. Learn to use prepositions to explain where data is and where it is going. Use real verbs. Do not say that “this is the notification e-mail address”. Say “This is the e-mail address to which a warning is automatically sent when the XYZ process stops unexpectedly.” Your users will thank you and they will be more likely to stick around because they understand how your product works and how to use it.

No Rest for the Wicked

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Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

The phrase “no rest for the wicked” is based on Isaiah chapter 48 verse 20 and chapter 57 verses 20 and 21:

20 But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. 21 There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.

The assertion at Dictionary.com that the verse refers to eternal torment is not supported by the context or by any Bible commentary of which I am aware.

The actual idea Isaiah expresses in his book is that humans will have a better life if they allow God to guide them. To illustrate, here are verses 17 through 19 of chapter 48:

This is what the Lord says—
your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel:
“I am the Lord your God,
who teaches you what is best for you,
who directs you in the way you should go.
If only you had paid attention to my commands,
your peace would have been like a river,
your well-being like the waves of the sea.
Your descendants would have been like the sand,
your children like its numberless grains;
their name would never be blotted out
nor destroyed from before me.”

So those who follow God’s advice for life as conveyed through prophets such as Isaiah will prosper. In contrast, the “wicked” (defined as those who sin by doing such things as worshiping idols or engaging in dishonest business practices) will experience unnecessary troubles in life. It is in this sense that there is no peace for them.

Within Christianity the view is that all humans are sinners, just some more than others. As the Apostle Paul says “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23). So even a believer could experience self-inflicted troubles due to failure to apply Biblical advice for stress-free living. Until well into the 20th century the average person would have been familiar with these ideas whether they were a believing Christian or not.

So the phrase “no rest for the wicked” is a self deprecating suggestion that whatever new difficulty has arisen is a consequence of the speaker’s own failure to organize and conduct their life in the best way.

A version of this article was posted at https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/255570/what-do-sam-and-die-hardman-mean-by-no-rest-for-the-wicked-and-idle-hands-and#255661

Double Negation

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A few years ago a user on Stack Exchange asked why the construction used in this English sentence is not considered a double negative.

If I don’t use the microphone, nobody will hear me.

This question was presumably prompted by the familiar admonition not to use a double negative. This warning refers to dialect constructions such as in this sentence:

If I don’t use no microphone, no one will hear me.

Notice that in the first clause both the verb and its direct object are negated. This is negative concord because the two negatives are intended to reinforce one another. They are in concord or agreement.

In standard English we would instead say:

If I don’t use the microphone, no one will hear me.

Leaving asside the question of whether non-standard forms of English should be used, the caution should not be understood literally. It does not mean that all uses of double negation violate the rules of formal English. A more precise statement of the rule would be: Standard English does not recognize negative concord as a valid construction.

In standard English double negatives cancel one another out to produce a positive as in mathematics. To illustrate this a teacher might ask the children to interpret the dialect sentence above as if it were standard English. The teacher guides them to this interpretation:

I must not use a microphone if I want to be heard.

This is nonsense, but it serves to illustrate an important point: double negatives are not forbidden in standard English, they simple cancel one another out. It is only an error if negative concord was intended. For example, this use of a double negative is good literary English:

Your complaints have not gone unheard.

The “not” and “un-” cancel one another out, so the sentence means:

Your complaints have been heard.

Though the emphasis is a little different. One negation serves to describe what the interlocutor fears while the second serves to indicate that it has not in fact taken place.

Now let us return to the question from Stack Exchange:

If I don’t use the microphone, nobody will hear me.

This sentence has two negations, but it does not display netagive concord. Nor do the negations cancel one another out (as in our example from literary English) since they are not in the same clause. Instead the two negations are in separate clauses joined in an if-then construct. We can simplify the sentence to this:

If no microphone, then no hearers.

We must use two negations in this sentence because the message is about two negations: negating the microphone negates the hearers.

A version of this post was originally published as an answer on Stack Exchange:

Why is, “If I don’t use the microphone, nobody will hear me,” not considered a double negative

Where Did Sputnik Get its Name?

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Postage stamp shows Earth in orbit around Sun with a man-made object in Earth orbit.

On October 5, 1957, the Soviet newspaper Pravda announced that the Soviet Union had launched a 184 pound object into Earth orbit. That first artificial satellite has since come to be known in the English-speaking world as Sputnik. In the West it is now widely assumed that the Soviets chose the word sputnik as the name for their satellite because it means “fellow traveler.” This is not what actually happened.

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Communicating Clearly About Computing

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Those of use who work in IT are frequently called upon to explain our work to people who are less familiar with computers than we are. It should be our goal to speak and write as clearly as possible. To do that we must avoid jargon, slang and expressions which are easily misunderstood. We should not write to be understood. We should write so as not to be misunderstood.
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