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

["Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)" <alx.manpages@gmail.com>]

On 1/8/21 2:23 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> 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 :-)

Hello Michael,

That made me think about it again, and well, a language isn't what books
say, but what people actually use.  That's something I learnt from the
Catalan language, which some institutions constantly try to normalize
differently than common usage, and it's weird, very very weird.

So, if most people use *dgement, I'd say the word is correctly spelled
*dgement.

But we need a common spelling, because I was searching in vim for the
word, and it was very weird because I knew the word was there, but it
didn't show it to me.  I had to manually move to the line to see that it
was written differently, on the same page! :/

So I hereby insist on my initial patch :-}

Cheers,

Alex


-- 
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/