Direction of Fedora desktop manager Gnome, related to complaints in OT morons thread

[Alan Cox]

> > You can find someone on the internet who will believe anything is
> > incorrect.
> 
> Sure, but that's rather beside the point.  We're not talking about the
> opinion of J.Random Nutter here, but about something that Fowler's
> Modern English Usage, also published by Oxford, warns about.

And.. there are a considerable number of people who consider that
Fowler's is J Random Nutter (notably everyone from Cambridge who don't
even agree with Oxford spelling rules)

> > Oxford by the way take bug reports, so you can write them a
> > letter giving examples of the problematic usage and suggesting changes -
> > but IMHO you have to balance excessive detail against usefulness in
> > any learning process.
> 
> Indeed so, but the problem arose here because someone, quite
> reasonably, tried to use the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary as an
> authority.  It's clearly not fit too be used as one.  I think that's

It's not an authority, there is no authority except the person who wrote
the words, hence Humpty.

> wrong: advanced learners deserve to be treated with a little more
> respect.  Even if you believe that anything goes, it's unfair not to
> tell an advanced learner that there is a controversy.

We could all go one better. As it was obvious what they meant so you could
simply have assumed that meaning. Who *cares* about the finer points of
US v Indian v UK English providing people are understood ? Should I go
around correcting every time some American writes "If I was" or other
horrors ?

Alan
(Who considers the queens subjects to be the bits that go with the queens
verbs and the queens objects)