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Comment by ghoomketu | Hacker News Reader

Wow never really knew this. I guess you need to have deep understanding of the language and maybe have English as your mother tongue to pick up on such things. No wonder text is so emotionless and people misread and get angry about what they think it means all the time. Yet, nobody misreads the tone of your voice or facial expressions.

Like in India we have a very common expression "I'm writing to intimate you.." which my American boss got really angry to read. For us it just means i'm writing to tell you, but many people esp from older gen use this a lot here to sound cool.

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While "intimate" can mean be familiar or familial, "intimidate" is a much more common and threatening word; due to being so much more common I can imagine it would be easy to misread and get a very different feeling from what you had intended. "I am writing to intimidate you..." is definitely not a good message to send to your boss.

> No wonder text is so emotionless and people misread and get angry

Native speakers definitely struggle with this as well. There is a diffucult balance between being too succinct (curt, impolite) and excessively wordy (feels forced or contrived, muddles the message).

Personally, when I communicate st work, I tend to phrase things as questions- either as a standalone comment or as a preamble to my argument. That way, I am (hopefully) clear that I am trying to be inclusive, rather than divisive, and I think it makes people less likely to project emotion from their own assumptions into what I write.

> "I'm writing to intimate you.."

This is a documented Indian English usage: "https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/intimate" (see the verb section).

Indian English has retained some strong markers from the British colonial period. There's no clear guide for how prestige and emulation will affect usage, but "to intimate" in either verbal form is a literary archaism in North American English.

Example of the difference between American and Indian English:

https://i.redd.it/fhmx835buxl51.jpg

>"to intimate" in either verbal form is a literary archaism in North American English

While the second (intransitive) version from that wiktionary page is Indian, the first use is most certainly not an archaism in North American English. In fact, it was listed as a normal definition in the first dictionary that Google returned with a definition.[0] The pronunciation does shift with which definition we intend, which nicely keeps "intimate details" from sounding too much like "mating". :-)

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=intimate+definition

> the first use is most certainly not an archaism in North American English

I understand your point and applaud your literacy. However, it's not a verb in common usage, and if our friend is using the verb to intimate in North American business English in any sense, I would advise him that the term is an archaism.

We can discuss at further leisure whether any given literary usage has at least one foot in the crypt of liberal education. ^_^

OED shows that the Indian English usage that we are discussing definitely comes from prior British English acceptations.

> which nicely keeps "intimate details" from sounding too much like "mating". :-)

OED also offers "one who intimates" to be an "intimater". (o;

The "to subtly imply" definition does still exist in American English. I'd suspect most people with university degrees to understand it when used.

It's a bit literary, yes, and would be out of place if used verbally or in a business communication, but it is not archaic.

> maybe have English as your mother tongue

Or Swedish :- ) Semicolon works in the same way, in Swedish. I think I didn't know much about the semicolon, though, until I had read a few books (in Swedish) about writing books (in Swedish).

Maybe most Latin languages? Oh not Greek. Hmm interesting how it works in Arabic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semicolon

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