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Comment by tmikaeld | Hacker News Reader

I'm not an English native speaker, but what does that headline even mean? " Microsoft Continues Right to Repair About Face"

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An “about face” is a term commonly called in military cadence indicating the soldier should turn around, completing a 180 degree turn. So when used colloquially it means someone or some business had a complete change of mind on some topic. In this case, Microsoft has changed their approach to repairability.

Ah, you learn something new every day! Thank you

English is mostly military metaphors, sports metaphors, and gambling metaphors stuck together.

I'm a native speaker and I didn't even know what it meant. Don't worry lol.

:-D

I would also like to see "Right-to-repair" hyphenated, else it's the right to "repair about face".

At first I was thinking Face-ID or Windows-Hello.

‘About face’ is refers to ‘a reversal of attitude, behavior, or point of view’.

In this case, they used to be against allowing users to repair their devices (using glue, usually), but they took an about face and are making it easier.

The title feels a bit like a garden-path sentence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

It's missing several hyphens. "Microsoft continues right-to-repair about-face."

It's a clear sentence, but if you're not a native speaker who is up on current lingo and idioms, it's an ambiguous twisty maze of a sentence. I'm trying to translate it into Spanish (not native for me) that communicates the same feel, and I would be dizzy trying to read it.

According to Merriam-Webster, it should be About-Face with a hyphen in between.

MW is pretty canonical for American English but the use or non-use of hyphens in many contexts (including this one) varies sufficiently that I'm not inclined to say one or the other is universally right or wrong. I'm not sure I would have used one here without looking at MW although I can see why it might be preferred.

For words that can be confusing if not read as tacked on to the next (or if read as being connected to the previous one instead of the next one) then the hyphenation is strongly recommended to avoid misparsing.

I had to search as well

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/about-face

"about face" means "complete change in stance"

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