Re: [PATCH] netlink.7, tcp.7: tfix: s/acknowledgment/acknowledgement

["Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>]

Hello Alex,

On 1/8/21 12:36 PM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
> 
> On 1/8/21 11:29 AM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
>> Hi Alex,
>>
>> On 1/7/21 5:55 PM, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>>> Signed-off-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>
>>
>> Take a look at
>>
>> https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=acknowledgment%2Cacknowledgement&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=5&smoothing=3
>>
>> and compare American English vs British English using the drop-down.
>>
>> When I inherited man-pages in 2004, it was a hodge-podge mix of 
>> American vs British spelling. My native spelling is the latter,
>> but I value consistency and felt that things needed to be
>> standardized on one or other, and in computing, American is the
>> norm so that is what I settled on.hodge-podge
>>
>> I'm largely at piece with American spelling these days (it 
>> is the spelling I use in most of my writing), but I guess
>> the one point that still bothers me are the American spellings
>> "acknowledgment" and "judgment". They just feel wrong.
> 
> Yup
> 
>>
>> However, I now learned from the Ngrams that even in British
>> English, the spelling without "e" was historically the norm.
>> So it seems that it is British English that has changed, 
>> not American English!
>>
>> I was about to say that I must decline this patch. And then
>> I thought I'd take a look at the POSIX standard. It seems
>> to largely follow American spelling (e.g., "color", "canceled",
>> "recognize", "analog").[1] But, it uses "acknowledgement"!
>> (There are even a couple of instances of "judgement" in 
>> the standard.) It seems like others like to have the
>> extra "e' in those words...
>>
>> So, I'm not sure what to do with this patch. 
> 
> Hey Michael,
> 
> D'oh, I thought it was a typo! :-)
> 
> American English surprises me.
> 
> Yes I prefer American English, but I've also learn_ed_ British at
> school, (and learnt American through the internet), so I have a weird
> hodge-podge in my head too :p
> 
> I guess many people though it was a typo from the data you put.  Also see:
> 
> $ grep -r acknowledgement \
>   |wc -l;
> grep: man7/.hostname.7.swp: binary file matches
> 69
> $ grep -r acknowledgment \
>   |wc -l;
> 23

Okay -- this gets weirder and weirder. Look more closely
at what the grep found. Those instances of 'acknowledgement'
are almost all in the page comments containing BSD licenses!

I thought to myself, that's strange: because BSD is from 
California... Maybe some enthusiastic person did a
global edit in the distant past to change this to British
spelling in the Linux manual pages. But, it doesn't seem that
way. I grepped a few thousand header files that I've assembled
over the years from various OSes, and in the BSD licenses,
the vast majority use 'acknowledgement'. A few use
'acknowledgment', but I suspect that those were changed
after importing from other places.

It seems that the underground spelling resistance was strong
at Berkeley.

> Nevertheless, I prefer American too, so I'd invert the patch.
> What about s/acknowledgement/acknowledgment/?
So, I still don't know what to do. I never much liked
the "American" "*dgment", but:

(1) That seems to have been the historical form that 
    British English moved away from.

(2) A couple of "American" groups (BSD, POSIX) use
    the "British" spelling.

Cheers,

Michael

PS I want to join the spelling resistance :-)

-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/