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

[Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>]

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Hi Branden,

On Tue, Feb 20, 2024 at 10:36:11AM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Alex,
> 
> At 2024-02-20T16:24:01+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > [Off-topic; just language curiosity; feel free to ignore]
> 
> [no worries]

I was preventing other innocent readers, who might not be aware of how
much we enjoy such converations.  :)

> > 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.

And you're probably right.

[...]

> > 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.

Huh!  I meant s/future/past/

> > 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.

Agree.  For documentation, we better write unambiguous English, and not
just correct English.

> 
> 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?

Yup.  "actual" may be actually correct as a synonymous of "current", but
it's more ambiguous actually than it might have been a long time ago, so
we better avoid it in documentation.  :)

Have a lovely day!
Alex

> 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



-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
Looking for a remote C programming job at the moment.

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