5 ms·
affected?
by jrgnsd 13y ago
affected?
- Ygg2 13y agoEh, no need to call in the Grammar Squad. Not to mention effect is correct here (effect means ‘to bring something about as a result’). Hacker News did bring something about as a result.
- libovness 13y agoRight, but it did not effect the site, it effected the site's downtime (the downtime is the result). I believe the usage is incorrect.
- tmikaeld 13y agoCorrect, i was just trying to be witty ;-)
- chris_mahan 13y agoAnd they were effectively affectionate in their response.
- jmmcd 13y agoGrammar Squad here with the facts. And just the facts. When effect is a verb, the object must be the change itself, similar to cause: "Hacker News effected a significant deterioration in site availability". With affect, the thing being changed is the object: "Hacker News affected the site."
- Ygg2 13y agoThanks for that input but HN is a casual site, not a uber professional one (i.e. place where most people look for jobs). I'm pretty sure we all know what it means.
- jmmcd 13y agoYes, everyone knows what it means. But if you make a claim like "effect is correct here" you are entering the debate, so don't call the debate off-topic when you lose.
- Ygg2 13y agoSadly I left that part out of the original claim. My apologies for perhaps sounding condescending. Correction was imo: a) correct (was proven false by you) b) unnecessary - pedantry is only OK in strictly professional context, which I don't consider HN to be. This was omitted from original claim by my error ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY). I really meant to thank you for correcting me there i.e. "Thanks for that input". It might have came of as sarcastic, but was not my intention. There is nothing (of value) to win/lose in a debate. In fact losing debate is more enlightening.
- gaius 13y agoIn Iain M Banks (RIP) Culture novels, the remote manipulation technology is called the Effector.
- gngeal 13y agoAny chance this is related to the relevant biological/neurological/robotics terminology?
- JonnieCache 13y agoThe problem is that the "Hacker News effect" is a noun, derived from the slashdot effect, and here that noun has been verbed.
- shangxiao 13y agoWhat nobody's quoted xkcd yet? http://xkcd.com/326 http://xkcd.com/326
- gngeal 13y ago"Eh, no need to call in the Grammar Squad." Obviously, as this is in the purview of the Lexicology Squad, not the Grammar Squad. "Hacker News did bring something about as a result." Except that Hacker News did not bring about the existence of the linked site, which would be the actual meaning of "effected the site".
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- anaphor 13y agoTechnically our mental lexicon is part of what constitutes grammar (as understood by linguists).
- gngeal 13y agoCould you elaborate on that? Since that doesn't make too much sense to me. From what I know, the movement goes in the opposite direction: much of what was considered "grammar" in the past has been reinterpreted as a part of the lexicon, now that we actually have adequate technology to work with humongous corpora.
- anaphor 13y agoSure. Linguists consider grammar to basically be what a person knows in order to say they are a fluent speaker of their language, which includes understanding words in that language. More narrowly speaking, lexical information is tied to syntactic information because certain syntactic constraints are imposed by our lexicons.
- GrinningFool 13y agoThat's one of my favorite things about HN. People (typically) don't jump on top of the minor grammatical errors, typos, and misusages that pretty much everyone who doesn't triple-check their posts is inclined to make. Unless they're particularly egregious, they're generally ignored and the content of the post is focused on instead.