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English is not a prescriptive language: there is no committee with whom you can register a meaning. But that means that meanings are determined by how people u
by geofft 8y ago
English is not a prescriptive language: there is no committee with whom you can register a meaning.
But that means that meanings are determined by how people use the term, and the OSI is claiming that what people generally mean by the term is the OSD, and backing up that claim with signatories.
It's of course possible to choose to mean something different by "kilogram." Nobody has trademarked the word. But the word nonetheless has a clear and well-accepted meaning, and someone who uses "kilogram" to mean "the weight of a liter of water from my tap right now" is using a nonstandard and potentially confusing definition. That's the point of their analogy.
- colechristensen 8y ago>It's of course possible to choose to mean something different by "kilogram." Nobody has trademarked the word. But the word nonetheless has a clear and well-accepted meaning, and someone who uses "kilogram" to mean "the weight of a liter of water from my tap right now" is using a nonstandard and potentially confusing definition. That's the point of their analogy. This is a very bad example. If I were to go to your grocery store and buy a kilogram of apples from you, but your "kilogram" was a weight invented by you, you would be breaking the law. More or less every country has legal definitions of weights and measures. They are not "common usage" but very strictly prescribed. OSI is trying hard to prescribe the meaning of a term they have no rights to.