4 ms·

I had a writing professor in college whose obsession with forcing us to write and speak "Queen's English" really soured me on hearing people correct someone els

I had a writing professor in college whose obsession with forcing us to write and speak "Queen's English" really soured me on hearing people correct someone else's grammar. Said professor went so far as to author his own style guide that we were forced to use for class because the existing ones were wrong for this reason or that. This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying.

rawTruthHurts 4y ago
> This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. Not that you can learn anything unless it sticks to a certain set of rules.
- IIsi50MHz 4y ago
  An _un_certain set of rules, you mean. Especially as we're on about language. (-: If the set of rules were certain, we might not be having the these discussions; yea, and proscriptive grammarians and tyrants of spelling would us all be.
dspillett 4y ago
A valuable life lesson though. I've followed coding standards that I don't entirely agree with¹²³, but breaking them would cause more discomfort for the larger project than the minor irritation keeping them would cause me. I'm sure the feeling is common in other career areas too, particularly professional writing. --- [1] Not using extra space to line up similar parts of similar lines when grouped together, for instance, I find it makes things easier to read and alter afterwards [2] Some codebases absolutely hate one-line if statements, it must be in a block even if only one statement is inside the conditional and the brackets must each be on their own line. I get that for more complex code it breaks things up visually in a way that is helpful, but stretching out 20..30 characters over four lines, artificially lengthening a function significantly if it happens multiple times… [3] One FOSS project I once submitted a patch for insisted on absolutely no inline comments – all explanation had to be in the comment block at the head of the function declaration. It almost discouraged commenting, and I like to comment liberally.
- irrational 4y ago
  [2] For me it has to do with scanning code. If if-statements are always in a block, then I can easily scan to or past it without having to stop and read what it actually says. But, if it is in a single line I have to stop and read it to understand that it is actually an if statement that was put onto a single line.
  - yissp 4y ago
    I've made the mistake of trying to add an extra statement to a one-line if and forgetting to add a block too many times. Although now GCC has -Wmisleading-indentation which should catch that.
    - anyfoo 4y ago
      Yes, exactly, it's just not worth the risk. It gets worse with preprocessor macro systems like C has, where something might look correct until you follow the macro definition.
  - downvotetruth 4y ago
    Username checks out
- anyfoo 4y ago
  Point 2 is also for security[1], especially in languages with non-hygienic[2] macro systems such as C. But as another commenter (yissp) already pointed out, even without macros it can quickly go bad. I once liked omitting blocks in if, while, for etc., but stopped doing it altogether and it now jumps out as a wart to me, too. It's just too risky for too little benefit. What I disagree with sometimes is whether the block needs to start on a new line. For example I would like to do this: if (foo = bar) { blah(); } But my former team was against it, and my current team uses a style enforcement tool (which I do agree with in principle), so I don't. Point 1 is fine by me and the team: We embrace "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment", so that fits into the philosophy. Point 3, i.e. disallowing inline comments, seems ill-conceived and bad to me. [1] Actually correctness, which often means security. [2] Or rather a generalization of what "hygienic macro" means.
Archelaos 4y ago
> This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. doohureehliebeeleafþatt?
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  While I'm probably responding to a joke, intelligibility isn't simply a binary. It's how we're able to have interesting connections between dialects or Danish, Swedish, Norwegian for example. The first rule of communication is knowing your audience and if one's language can be adapted in simplicity, complexity, lexicon, grammar, content, style, voice, medium &c to be more readily understood, then it's in the speaker's benefit to do so. If GP's teacher could not earnestly understand vulgar English then by all means adapt, but the sense that I'm getting is that they were being obstinate on purpose and those sort of people should live in the communicative bubble of isolation they put themselves in.
  - Archelaos 4y ago
    Well, my "joke" was ment as a demonstration, that the rules have the purpose to make it easy to be understood. I bent the rules a bit, so that it should still be possible to decode my message, but not easily. This should demonstrate that rules are not completely arbitrary, even if (some) people can understand what I am saying.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  You're showing a case though where you diverge from the current conventions so much that it's incredibly hard to understand what you're saying, so I'm not sure you're going against OP's point. By the way, as a European person (speaking multiple European languages, even) living in the US for a decade, you quickly give up on taking language "rules" too seriously or else you go insane. What English (partly US English, partly "English in general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also interesting is that unlike any other language I speak, reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know how it's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for example seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared to e.g. German or Italian, but it's still consistent. If I had to guess, I'd think that's too a large part because of things like the Great Vowel Shift, and loan words from multiple languages. (Not a linguist though, so eh, just stupid guesses.)
CivBase 4y ago
> This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. I disagree. Kind of. Like all languages, English is a tool. The more complicated that tool is, the harder it is to learn/use, the less effective it is. YAML and HTML are easy examples of how the complexity of a language can hurt its utility. There's something to be said for maintaining a formal spec that guards against changes that would introduce unnecessary complexity. However... a spec like that doesn't exist for English - at least not one that most of its users agree upon - and being able to understand what people are trying to communicate is absolutely the most important feature of any language. Therefor, I consider it a faux pas to strictly enforce arbitrary rules like your professor did. Frankly, it sounds like he was just using his position to take out his frustration on others.

rawTruthHurts 4y ago

> This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. Not that you can learn anything unless it sticks to a certain set of rules.

IIsi50MHz 4y ago
An _un_certain set of rules, you mean. Especially as we're on about language. (-: If the set of rules were certain, we might not be having the these discussions; yea, and proscriptive grammarians and tyrants of spelling would us all be.

dspillett 4y ago

A valuable life lesson though. I've followed coding standards that I don't entirely agree with¹²³, but breaking them would cause more discomfort for the larger project than the minor irritation keeping them would cause me. I'm sure the feeling is common in other career areas too, particularly professional writing. --- [1] Not using extra space to line up similar parts of similar lines when grouped together, for instance, I find it makes things easier to read and alter afterwards [2] Some codebases absolutely hate one-line if statements, it must be in a block even if only one statement is inside the conditional and the brackets must each be on their own line. I get that for more complex code it breaks things up visually in a way that is helpful, but stretching out 20..30 characters over four lines, artificially lengthening a function significantly if it happens multiple times… [3] One FOSS project I once submitted a patch for insisted on absolutely no inline comments – all explanation had to be in the comment block at the head of the function declaration. It almost discouraged commenting, and I like to comment liberally.

irrational 4y ago
[2] For me it has to do with scanning code. If if-statements are always in a block, then I can easily scan to or past it without having to stop and read what it actually says. But, if it is in a single line I have to stop and read it to understand that it is actually an if statement that was put onto a single line.
- yissp 4y ago
  I've made the mistake of trying to add an extra statement to a one-line if and forgetting to add a block too many times. Although now GCC has -Wmisleading-indentation which should catch that.
  - anyfoo 4y ago
    Yes, exactly, it's just not worth the risk. It gets worse with preprocessor macro systems like C has, where something might look correct until you follow the macro definition.
- downvotetruth 4y ago
  Username checks out
anyfoo 4y ago
Point 2 is also for security[1], especially in languages with non-hygienic[2] macro systems such as C. But as another commenter (yissp) already pointed out, even without macros it can quickly go bad. I once liked omitting blocks in if, while, for etc., but stopped doing it altogether and it now jumps out as a wart to me, too. It's just too risky for too little benefit. What I disagree with sometimes is whether the block needs to start on a new line. For example I would like to do this: if (foo = bar) { blah(); } But my former team was against it, and my current team uses a style enforcement tool (which I do agree with in principle), so I don't. Point 1 is fine by me and the team: We embrace "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment", so that fits into the philosophy. Point 3, i.e. disallowing inline comments, seems ill-conceived and bad to me. [1] Actually correctness, which often means security. [2] Or rather a generalization of what "hygienic macro" means.

Archelaos 4y ago

> This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. doohureehliebeeleafþatt?

kelseyfrog 4y ago
While I'm probably responding to a joke, intelligibility isn't simply a binary. It's how we're able to have interesting connections between dialects or Danish, Swedish, Norwegian for example. The first rule of communication is knowing your audience and if one's language can be adapted in simplicity, complexity, lexicon, grammar, content, style, voice, medium &c to be more readily understood, then it's in the speaker's benefit to do so. If GP's teacher could not earnestly understand vulgar English then by all means adapt, but the sense that I'm getting is that they were being obstinate on purpose and those sort of people should live in the communicative bubble of isolation they put themselves in.
- Archelaos 4y ago
  Well, my "joke" was ment as a demonstration, that the rules have the purpose to make it easy to be understood. I bent the rules a bit, so that it should still be possible to decode my message, but not easily. This should demonstrate that rules are not completely arbitrary, even if (some) people can understand what I am saying.
anyfoo 4y ago
You're showing a case though where you diverge from the current conventions so much that it's incredibly hard to understand what you're saying, so I'm not sure you're going against OP's point. By the way, as a European person (speaking multiple European languages, even) living in the US for a decade, you quickly give up on taking language "rules" too seriously or else you go insane. What English (partly US English, partly "English in general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also interesting is that unlike any other language I speak, reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know how it's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for example seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared to e.g. German or Italian, but it's still consistent. If I had to guess, I'd think that's too a large part because of things like the Great Vowel Shift, and loan words from multiple languages. (Not a linguist though, so eh, just stupid guesses.)

CivBase 4y ago

> This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. I disagree. Kind of. Like all languages, English is a tool. The more complicated that tool is, the harder it is to learn/use, the less effective it is. YAML and HTML are easy examples of how the complexity of a language can hurt its utility. There's something to be said for maintaining a formal spec that guards against changes that would introduce unnecessary complexity. However... a spec like that doesn't exist for English - at least not one that most of its users agree upon - and being able to understand what people are trying to communicate is absolutely the most important feature of any language. Therefor, I consider it a faux pas to strictly enforce arbitrary rules like your professor did. Frankly, it sounds like he was just using his position to take out his frustration on others.