Author Topic: Technical misnomers, ambiguous or plain incorrect terms in general usage.  (Read 30040 times)

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Offline JohnnyMalaria

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It's only the US that does that, though apparently the international standard for date formatting is YYYY-MM-DD.

Indeed. Isn't this the Japanese way?

After years of using the format I mentioned, I've just realized that it uses English names for months which is a bit presumptuous.
 

Offline tggzzz

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It's only the US that does that, though apparently the international standard for date formatting is YYYY-MM-DD.

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

You might like to start by reading
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339
https://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
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Offline GeorgeOfTheJungle

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What amazes me is how many native speakers write it's when it's its.
Its like their totally confused, which means your confused as well.
I hope all that incorrectness was intentional.
Its, his kidding.
« Last Edit: June 18, 2018, 05:49:28 pm by GeorgeOfTheJungle »
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Offline free_electron

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Organic foods. As opposed to what  ? synthetic foods ?
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Any comments, or points of view expressed, are my own and not endorsed , induced or compensated by my employer(s).
 

Offline helius

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The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

You might like to start by reading
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html
Do note that although at first glance the ISO time standard appears sane, it contains two very different concepts both called "a year": one is the year you already know about, but the other one is "the year for the purposes of the ISO week", which is something different. Getting this wrong can make your software badly bugged and this has caused widespread outages.
 

Offline Bassman59

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When I hear a commentator talking about "the optics of the situation," I want to hit them with a Louisville Slugger.
 

Offline duak

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Decimate used to mean removing one in ten.  Something about a roman centurion ordering every tenth legionaire to walk off a cliff to impress the foe.  Now it generally means wiped out.  Technically in DSP it means resampling to reduce the data rate.

Errant apostrophe's.

Irregardless isn't really a word.  Is disirregardlessy not one too?

Misused optical terms like "Increase our visibility into the situation"  perhaps using "laser focus" to improve the etendue?
 

Offline Bassman59

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Decimate used to mean removing one in ten.  Something about a roman centurion ordering every tenth legionaire to walk off a cliff to impress the foe. 

It was a means of enforcing discipline. To handle infractions, the head of the legion would demand that one tenth of a cohort be killed -- and the members of the cohort themselves had to decide who died.

But yeah, now it means basically "totally eradicate."
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Its like their totally confused, which means your confused as well.
Make that "Its like there totally confused witch means your confused as well", so we get to the levels of noise that :scared: me.

At least Chinglish manuals try to convey some concepts.  With sloppy text like above, you cannot even tell if there is a signal there under the noise.

For example, I would never have put a comma in the snippet of your comment above. But, now that I live in the US, I use them more.
I don't use commas (or apostrophes) correctly myself. I was talking about the specific case where they are completely omitted, making the text difficult to understand.  It is particularly horrible when documentation lists something, and you are left wondering where the delimiters are.  Especially if some of the text includes the serial comma and some does not.

Something like "a, b; c; d, e, f" is pretty clearly an ordered set of three isubsets, with "a" and "b" in the first set, "c" in the second set; and "d", "e", and "f" in the third set.  See what I did with the semicolon there? It may be wrong or annoying, but it sure makes the list clear!

Dates also jar my brain.
The international standard, YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (ISO 8601, if you replace the space with a T) is the one that sorts correctly when sorted alphabetically or numerically. (The largest units are on the left, smallest right, in decreasing order of significance.)  That is what makes it useful, in my opinion.

Errant apostrophe's.
Apologies for mine.  I'm severely irked by people omitting possessive suffixes in Finnish, and it seems to affect my grasp of the English possessive negatively.

(Instead of writing "My Telia" as "Minun Teliani", people shorten it (even in official writing) to "Minun Telia", which sounds and reads like "Muh Telia" to me. I not like. Langage too many. Want simple, easy. Back to cave now.)
 

Offline JohnnyMalaria

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The international standard, YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (ISO 8601, if you replace the space with a T) is the one that sorts correctly when sorted alphabetically or numerically. (The largest units are on the left, smallest right, in decreasing order of significance.)  That is what makes it useful, in my opinion.


Indeed. Kind of a pain to write on a check/cheque. though!


Of course, the 24-hour HH throws a good portion of the western hemisphere.
 

Offline David Hess

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However, I get confused because one half of my brain wants to put the comma there, the other doesn't.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/comma-fault
 

Offline JohnnyMalaria

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However, I get confused because one half of my brain wants to put the comma there, the other doesn't.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/comma-fault


Therein lies part of the problem: an American English reference source. Some grammar rules in one variant of English are considered absolutely forbidden in others. A case in point is the Oxford comma. You will hardly ever see it in British English. Also the placement of full stops at the end of sentences relative to other trailing punctuation.
 

Offline David Hess

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However, I get confused because one half of my brain wants to put the comma there, the other doesn't.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/comma-fault

Therein lies part of the problem: an American English reference source. Some grammar rules in one variant of English are considered absolutely forbidden in others. A case in point is the Oxford comma. You will hardly ever see it in British English. Also the placement of full stops at the end of sentences relative to other trailing punctuation.

It is still a comma fault in British English although I do not know if they use a different term.

If the comma was removed, then it would be a run-on sentence.  Adding just a comma to separate two complete sentences is a comma fault.  The British recommendation is to use a conjunction preceded by a comma and that works in American English as well.

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/page_06.htm
 

Offline rdl

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...
Errant apostrophe's.
...

Normally you do not use an apostrophe to form plurals.

Or is that error intentional as Mr. Scram's post appears to be?

Quote
Its like their totally confused, which means your confused as well.

Which makes no sense at all unless rewritten:

It's like they're totally confused, which means you're confused as well.


I find it helpful when using contractions to substitute the actual two words to see if the statement still makes sense.

It's paint was flaking off.
It is paint was flaking off.

This also helps with confusion between your and you're, their and they're, and so on.


 
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Offline Mr. Scram

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Normally you do not use an apostrophe to form plurals.

Or is that error intentional as Mr. Scram's post appears to be?

Which makes no sense at all unless rewritten:

It's like they're totally confused, which means you're confused as well.


I find it helpful when using contractions to substitute the actual two words to see if the statement still makes sense.

It's paint was flaking off.
It is paint was flaking off.

This also helps with confusion between your and you're, their and they're, and so on.
Mentioning Poes law still wasn't enough?  ::)
 

Offline VK3DRB

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"I've run out of bandwidth." Often misused by the technically illiterate such as politicians and journalists to mean how much data they can download per month.
 

Offline SG-1

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Power Flow is another one I hear frequently.   At work we even have a mechanical drawing titled "Power Flow"  |O.  In English that actually means flow of energy flow.
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Offline Cyberdragon

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Normally you do not use an apostrophe to form plurals.

Or is that error intentional as Mr. Scram's post appears to be?

Which makes no sense at all unless rewritten:

It's like they're totally confused, which means you're confused as well.


I find it helpful when using contractions to substitute the actual two words to see if the statement still makes sense.

It's paint was flaking off.
It is paint was flaking off.

This also helps with confusion between your and you're, their and they're, and so on.
Mentioning Poes law still wasn't enough?  ::)

'cause peeps that like talk like dis in dem dere weird tounges insomuch as text speak IRL are like totes off my books.

 ::) >:D

*BZZZZZZAAAAAP*
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Offline Monkeh

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Kilobyte.

*dons flame-proof suit and enters bunker*
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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'cause peeps that like talk like dis in dem dere weird tounges insomuch as text speak IRL are like totes off my books.
Hey, nothing ambiguous or particularly hard to understand there.   It is sentences that consist of words that seem correct, but are misspelled (so homonyms or homophones), that non-natives like me have the most trouble with.

I did not intend to derail this discussion into peoples favourite grammar/syntax errors; I only brought it up because they make detailed descriptions or specifications hard to read, and also because I have not seen (I think any!) in this forum.

In particular, those who help those-of-us-who-need-some-help, especially in the Beginner section, deserve some praise; for both their efforts, but also for their clarity of posting.  :-+

Kilobyte.
Why? SI says 1 kB = 1000 B, 1 KiB = 210 B = 1024 B.

As a programmer, I do use the KiB/MiB/GiB/TiB prefixes, but in spoken languages, I use powers of two (210, 220, 230, and 240, respectively) instead of the muppet names. Kibi, mebi, gibi, etc. have always reminded of that orange-haired scientist muppet..
 

Offline GeorgeOfTheJungle

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The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
 

Offline David Hess

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"I've run out of bandwidth." Often misused by the technically illiterate such as politicians and journalists to mean how much data they can download per month.

I have given up on that one.  ISPs deliberately confuse the issue to maintain that their limited internet is unlimited and their transfer caps are not caps.

Kilobyte.

*dons flame-proof suit and enters bunker*

No suit is flame proof enough and no bunker is protected enough for that one.

Memory is not measured in SI units.  Get back to me when I can buy 524.288 kilobit RAM.
 

Offline BillB

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No suit is flame proof enough and no bunker is protected enough for that one.
Memory is not measured in SI units.  Get back to me when I can buy 524.288 kilobit RAM.

Agreed! 

There are only 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't.
 
 

Offline Monkeh

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Kilobyte.

What's wrong with that?

It's ambiguous due to being used incorrectly.
 

Offline Mr. Scram

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"I've run out of bandwidth." Often misused by the technically illiterate such as politicians and journalists to mean how much data they can download per month.
Generally the speed of a connection is greatly reduced when you exceed your download limit. In that case, you quite literally run out of bandwidth. Though I doubt that's what these people mean.
 


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