Re: [PATCH] delete_module.2: Update man to actual syscall behaviour

["G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>]

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Hi Alex,

At 2024-02-20T16:24:01+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> [Off-topic; just language curiosity; feel free to ignore]

[no worries]

> That's also taught in Spanish high school.  The Spanish word is
> "actual" too, which means current.

Oy vey.  I've got more training in Spanish than any other non-English
language, and never hit that one.

I raised this point because it was (mis-)used repeatedly in groff
documentation and I had to clean it up.  It was then that I learned that
this specific solecism is frequent in technical writing where there is
multinational collaboration.

> See some `dict actual` entries:
> 
> 	From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
> 
> 	  Actual \Ac"tu*al\ (#; 135), a. [OE. actuel, F. actuel, L.
> 	     actualis, fr. agere to do, act.]
> 	...
> 	  
> 	     3. In action at the time being; now exiting; present; as the
> 		actual situation of the country.
> 		[1913 Webster]
> 
> and
> 
> 	From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
> 
> 	  actual
> 	      adj
> 	...
> 	      5: being or existing at the present moment; "the ship's actual
> 		 position is 22 miles due south of Key West"
> 
> Some other dictionaries don't acknowledge this meaning, and claim it's
> a mistake.  Do you know who is right about it?  I fear some dictionaries
> might be ahistorically removing that meaning.  Even if that meaning
> wasn't the main one, it probably was correct some time in the future.
> I'd like to see some investigation showing history of that meaning
> before claiming it's wrong.  I rather call out the Cambridge dictionary
> and others as being wrong.

I'm not sufficiently credentialed to argue with published dictionaries,
but I will offer that the use of "present" in these definitions has to
be understood in context, and note should be take of the one we're using
here.  When discussing software, implementations sometimes don't match
specifications--documented behavior may not be reflected in code.

So when we encounter the phrase "in the actual version", one can infer
that a description is being offered in contrast to some non-actual
version; perhaps some change of intention occurred in the passage from
design document or bug report to the code as written.

But, in my experience, most of the time when we see "in the actual
version", all the (typically non-native) speaker is trying to impart is
a temporal statement about the present (or near-present) situation, not
drawing a contrast between intentions elsewhere document and actuality.

Returning to your examples:

> 	     3. In action at the time being; now exiting; present; as the
> 		actual situation of the country.

Contrast:

"The Central Committee of the Communist Party reported that per capita
intake of nutritional calories in Ukraine in 1933 was 13% higher than in
England."

If a historian were to offer some perspective on that claim, their use
of the word "actual" would be contrasting reality with assertion more
strongly than it would be nailing down a temporal datum.

Similarly:

> 	      5: being or existing at the present moment; "the ship's actual
> 		 position is 22 miles due south of Key West"

"The ship's reported position was 5 miles southwest of Bahía de los
Cochinos."

The contrast between "reported" and "actual" here is a more
significant factor than "at the present moment".  Given enough time, a
ship could move from one location to the other, just as an API can
change over time; but when we use "actual", our emphasis is not on
temporal matters even though we often need some temporal information to
decide the truth of a claim.

Does this clarify?

For more along these lines, I highly recommend Jeremy Gardner's document
"Misused English words and expressions in EU Publications".

https://www.eca.europa.eu/other%20publications/en_terminology_publication/en_terminology_publication.pdf

Regards,
Branden

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