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Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

> En masse?

My French is just fine - merci beaucoup - yet unfortunately yet another HN thread gets distracted from the intention of a post by someone determined to focus on semantics :/

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Never in my life as a native speaker of American English have I ever seen “on mass” used like that. It’s fair to ask for clarification since “on mass” in that sentence is very, very unusual (dare I say “incorrect”).

PP was asking to clarify your English, not your French, so that readers could understand what you were trying to express with your neologism.

> PP was asking to clarify your English, not your French, so that readers could understand...

(This is the first time I've had this on HN) but I have no idea what you mean. Is someone really not understanding? It looks like they're trying to correct what I wrote :/

It's a product produced in quantity, but not “mass-produced”.

There is no English expression “on mass.” The expression used by English speakers are the French words _en masse_.

The point is, assuming that we all knew what the original commenter meant—and I think we did—it's rude to correct their usage. This has been basic netiquette since Usenet.

I don’t think it’s necessarily clear what they meant because “en masse” has been pretty thoroughly borrowed into English as a singular phrase, as have many other French words and phrases. To then literally translate that borrowed phrase back into English is just confusing because those English words are not correct in that context (while the borrowed French phrase is).

For what it’s worth I definitely did a double take and had to re-read the sentence because I was not expecting those words there.

I like being corrected. Actually, I would consider it rude if you didn't correct me. Thank you for helping me making less mistakes in the future.

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