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> I hate this passive voice. To be pedantically clear, the first sentence here is not passive! Both clauses there have an explicit subject (‘this’ and ‘we’ res
by bradrn 4y ago
> I hate this passive voice.
To be pedantically clear, the first sentence here is not passive! Both clauses there have an explicit subject (‘this’ and ‘we’ respectively) and neither verb (‘means’ and ‘need’) is passivised. I like Geoffrey K. Pullum’s article on what is and isn’t passive: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html
(Not that this means the announcement isn’t problematic, mind you. It still feels like it’s trying to avoid focussing on something. And yes, the second sentence does this by means of the passive voice. I just get annoyed when people misidentify it, as they seem to do regularly.)
- musicale 4y agoImpacted, while passive, seems like a fairly good metaphor for being fired because it calls to mind being hit and possibly crushed to death, as in "The bicyclists were impacted by the truck."
- ttymck 4y agoThe truck was in the bike lane, and they needed to use caution when going around? EDIT: alright, go ahead and change your comment entirely
- berniedurfee 4y agoImpaled?
- LightBug1 4y agoImploded.
- idlewords 4y agoThe parent cited a sentence in the passive voice; why not just leave it be? Why 'pedantically' correct things that aren't wrong?
- NikolaNovak 4y agoIt's a tricky judgment call and not everybody will receive it the same. But I like learning little tidbits! Crucially, I don't think poster did a "pedantic correction" for the sake of unfairly dismissing the point ; they did it to educate and that always gets credit in my book :)
- bradrn 4y agoBecause (a) some people might find it interesting; (b) some people might misunderstand what they were referring to; and (c) I like languages.