But language is for communication, and the most correct language is that which communicates best.
A conversation burdened with “well actually” tangents about one participant’s personal passion gets pretty tiresome.
I don't think shittalking "well actually" conversations in the context of an equipment vendor making a cutely-titled article that is very sympathetic to the inexact language around designators for products they offer is the play.
"Your service request will result in X hours of downtime, as well as ireversible data loss between T1 and T2, and a reset of your system back to the state it was in at T1. All changes and interactions after T1 will be lost. Is this what you expect and want?"
Beyond a certain amount of service disruption or monetary investment, asking twice and making sure is prudent, not pedantic.
Nothing saves money like a good well actually.
But things like DB9 and RJ45 are so commonly used that anyone taking them literally is either being obstinate or are completely new to the field.
This seems to be biased in US-American culture. In Germany, people are in my observation much more prone to analyze words and sentences (often by their origins), and many people wouldn't accept a "wrong" way to express things to be correct.
Just to give one example (which also works in English): "[die] Alternative" (the alternative): this word comes from Latin "alter, altera, alterum" (the other). This means, that there exists only one other. So educated people love to point out that talking of multiple "Alternativen" [alternatives] is wrong; by the word origin there can only exist one alternative (the other one). If more than one "alternatives" exist, so, to be precise, you likely want to use a different word.
Addendum: nevertheless: "alternate" is also derived fron "alter, altera, alterum" (the other one), so my point above still holds.
"The" often refers to a group or category.
"The other" is actually a phrase I would take to be incredibly inclusive in meaning if not followed by another specifier (it means "the category of everything that is not us").
"The alternative" is similarly a category structure. It's a singular category, made of many possible members, or alternatives.
You may still only pick a single alternate for each case, but that does not mean that a category of multiple possible alternative choices does not exist.
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All that said, sparkfun is messing up by labeling this DE9. Spoken as someone who's done quite a bit of serial communication work. The defacto industry term is DB9, whether they like it or not, and most searching/purchasing will be done using that term. This is a "technically correct" fun article, with a name that would immediately mean I don't ever find this product (and would not purchase this product) unless they highlight that this is a DB9 breakout board with a bad name.
Simple test? Amazon has more than 4000 results for "db9 cable" and only ~110 results for "de9" cable. Even specialty sites like McMaster, which are usually pretty particular with their terms are happily calling this a db9 connector: https://www.mcmaster.com/products/connectors/computer-connec...
> "The" often refers to a group or category.
But this does not hold for the meaning of Latin "alter, altera, alterum" (the other one), from which the German and English word "Alternative"/"alternative" is derived.
Meanings have shifted since Roman times.
But that is a communication context, and there are other contexts where implications and assumed meanings are expected, and spelling everything out would be considered pompous, self-important, and ridiculous.
Perhaps not in Germany? But certainly elsewhere (but i believe that in German the pronoun "sie" can require assumed context to understand).
> Perhaps not in Germany? But certainly elsewhere (but i believe that in German the pronoun "sie" can require assumed context to understand).
I would indeed claim that in German such assumptions are often spelled out more explicitly than in English.
In casual language, sure, whatever.