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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

I wish it was socially acceptable to reply with a compiler error when people use these words. Like "Ambiguous token in the current namespace." Maybe that makes me a nerd, on the spectrum, or just pedantic. Or a pedantic nerd on the spectrum.

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Somewhat related: I wish human languages would have the concept of a parse error. Often enough someone says something to me that I'll hear with 100% clarity, but still have no clue what they are trying to say, after which it's often time to play the "what" game until they rephrase.

"Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you're saying, would you mind elaborating?"

"Can you rephrase that?"

"Sorry, I understood the words but not the sentence"

"Doesn't sound like anything to me."

Ah but that's not strictly true, since it usually involves perfectly grammatically correct sentences that still just don't make sense.

You might find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence interesting.

Very interesting. The article's "see also" references branch prediction. Given all the nascent security findings around cache security, it makes me wonder whether disfluency could be used to attack cognition, in interrogative techniques or subversive advertising, for instance.

While on the topic of insufferable linguistic pedantry: I always cringe when people use that to introduce subordinate clauses instead of who when the subject refers to humans, but don’t say anything because the majority does not seem to be bothered by this. Example: “The coders that use sublime are great.”

P.S. I also like to use the word insufferable, picked it up from Pride and Prejudice, unfortunately doesn’t get the usage it deserves nowadays.

P.P.S Not many people use P.S. in their emails/posts either, would be a good habit to bring back.

From Oxford Dictionaries Online: "It is sometimes argued that, in relative clauses, that should be used for non-human references, while who should be used for human references: a house that overlooks the park but the woman who lives next door. In practice, while it is true to say that who is restricted to human references, the function of that is flexible. It has been used for human and non-human references since at least the 11th century, and is invaluable where both a person and a thing is being referred to, as in a person or thing that is believed to bring bad luck."

(Sorry if I'm being insufferable :-)

Good information, thanks.

Some years ago, while skimming The DFW Reader (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21423291-the-david-foste...), I saw the fact he included the exclusivity of who to humans on his list of good practices for students in the class he taught.

There's nothing more socially damning than expecting actual communication when conversing with people.

Reminds me of the old quote, "The great enemy of communication is the illusion of it."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/31/illusion/

There's another type of language ambiguity in some languages, where the way a word is used makes it unclear what is the object and what is the subject in that sentence. It happens e.g. in Polish sometimes. Can't think of a good example now, but I recall that in my more pedantic days, I used to write stuff like: "subject --verb--> object" or "object <--verb subject" to distinguish between the cases. Unfortunately, it didn't catch on.

"Dzieci lubią psy" could in principle mean either "Kids like dogs" or "Dogs like kids". In practice there's no ambiguity (at least in this example), because SVO is a much more natural order.

It would be more socially acceptable if you were specific, like asking the person directly about which word was ambiguous.

I think the takeaway here is that compiler errors could use more specificity and grammar checks too...

"Ambiguous token `literally` in the `English` namespace."

Now I'm cool!

"I'm not sure what you mean by X; did you mean X1 or X2?" is a perfectly reasonable thing to say during a conversion (modulo formality)

I replied "context error" in a chat with a friend once. It didn't go well.

You should learn Chinese.

Difficult to be a nerd without a sinew of pedantry.

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