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At the risk of being an obnoxious pedant, "nontrivial amount of work" is, to me, a non sequitur. Trivial describes the complexity of work, not the amount. Work
by numlocked 15y ago
At the risk of being an obnoxious pedant, "nontrivial amount of work" is, to me, a non sequitur. Trivial describes the complexity of work, not the amount. Work is either well understood (trivial) or not well understood (non-trivial). In either case the work effort itself can be variable.
I can't comment on the accuracy of your comment otherwise. Those who can, write content. Those who can't, nitpick semantics :)
- georgemcbay 15y agoIf you want to be a hardline language pendant about it, "trivial" describes neither an amount, nor complexity but commonness. But either way, yeah, you're being obnoxious because idiomatically "trivial" when applied to work fits fine and is easily understood for all of these scenarios (complexity, amount, and uncommon vs common). I certainly wouldn't consider collecting all the trash in the LA metro area "trivial work" by the well-understood meaning of the phrase even though it is commonly done and it is easily broken down into non-complex steps.
- wahnfrieden 15y agoPrescriptivist vs descriptivist, and entirely off-topic.