Forums login grammar

[lsemmens]

Oh, and shouldn't the subject be 'Forums log in grammar'?

You are still wrong. It should read "Fora log in grammar". Peadant? Moi?

[catweazel]

Oh, and shouldn't the subject be 'Forums log in grammar'?

You are still wrong. It should read "Fora log in grammar".

No, forums is also an acceptable pluralisation of forum. That said, I've always taken the view that people who use the word fora are mostly illiterate with a completely unwarranted and overblown sense of self-aggrandisement of their puny command of English

Peadant?

sic.

[all41]

He's back. And in good form.
Hey cw, how many badgers did you see on your vacation----none?
Just reinforces what I said earlier regarding catweazel territory.

[lsemmens]

Oh, and shouldn't the subject be 'Forums log in grammar'?

You are still wrong. It should read "Fora log in grammar".

No, forums is also an acceptable pluralisation of forum. That said, I've always taken the view that people who use the word fora are mostly illiterate with a completely unwarranted and overblown sense of self-aggrandisement of their puny command of English

Peadant?

sic.

I deserved that!

[catweazel]

You are still wrong. It should read "Fora log in grammar".

No, forums is also an acceptable pluralisation of forum. That said, I've always taken the view that people who use the word fora are mostly illiterate with a completely unwarranted and overblown sense of self-aggrandisement of their puny command of English

Peadant?

sic.

I deserved that!

[kyphi]

Welcome back catweazel! Your continued presence is appreciated. Is it still monsoon season in Bali or was that Thailand?

"Fora" has as yet not been obliterated from English language dictionaries and hopefully the evolution of English will fix that soon. It should have been removed long ago, in my opinion, as it only leads astray those pretending to know Latin. This is an English-speaking forum and the plural of forum is forums.

Would folks like to discuss the plural of "virus" next? There have been some amazing inventions for the plural of virus ... or is that too far off the beaten track?

[Moem]

I reference a book, you know the thing made out of paper with words in it

For those who are wondering: it's a stack of printed documents, glued or sewn together on one side and protected by a more or less sturdy cover.

[gm10]

Got one for you, not entirely on-topic but certainly related:

Mint 19 MATE, mintmenu menubar gets it wrong:

Logout.png

floating panel gets it right (spelling that is, not capitalization):

Log out.png

[catweazel]

floating panel gets it right:
Log out.png

I would class "Log Out user" as correct. Mixed caps, fnar!

[gm10]

I would class "Log Out user" as correct. Mixed caps, fnar!

aGREED aND cLARIFIED.

[catweazel]

I would class "Log Out user" as correct. Mixed caps, fnar!

aGREED aND cLARIFIED.

Of course that should've been wouldn't...

[gm10]

I would class "Log Out user" as correct. Mixed caps, fnar!

aGREED aND cLARIFIED.

Of course that should've been wouldn't...

Donald, is that you?

[catweazel]

aGREED aND cLARIFIED.

Of course that should've been wouldn't...

Donald, is that you?

Nonsense.

[rene]

That said, I've always taken the view that people who use the word fora are mostly illiterate with a completely unwarranted and overblown sense of self-aggrandisement of their puny command of English

"native English speaking people" I hope, since otherwise the fact that "forum" nor "fora" is an originally nor exclusively English word seems to mostly say something about your personal level of command of anything but English...

[dman]

Sarcasm aside, nobody controls it, but we all seem to be able to comment on it — some with better persuasion and logic than others.

Tut! Tut! Tut! Sarcasm aside, you say.

The point, which you completely missed, is that you complain about noun-verb confusion in English yet admit that language is fluid. The fact is, English is driven by popular usage. As for log in or login, I was in IT before you were born, and anybody who knows IT doesn't really give a hoot, let alone two, if people use the verb or the noun form. The bald truth is, it doesn't matter, except to the odd complaining pedant.

PS: In the US they 'do science'.

Oh, and shouldn't the subject be 'Forums log in grammar'?

You've made a lot of wrong assumptions about me, my background, my predilections, my views on English, and even my age. Your post strikes me as wholly uncharitable given what I wrote. I'm left to wonder if you even read much of that post of mine past the sentence you quoted, since I explicitly brought up some of the things you imply I neither get nor agree with. It seems to me you're just taking swipes because you can, or think you can, and you find it entertaining. Next I half-expect to be called “pedo” instead of “pedant.”

I have no idea if you're older than me or younger, but I don't see why that's so important. For the record, I'm 62 and my first computer was a Radio Shack Model I in 1977. A few years before that, I was in high school when the first four-function calculator came on the mass market. I used a slide rule in chem class in 11th grade. Somewhat later, in 1979, I took a BASIC course and I programmed my own spreadsheet for the Model III I had by then (with a cassette tape for media), because I didn't want to spend $39 or something for the silly commercial software that was offered for that. Those were pre-PC and pre-Lotus-123 days. I traded stocks and I used the program I wrote to keep track of things.

It says up at the top of this screen "Open chat," so that's what I'm going to do more of now. In 1987 I bought a few shares on spec of a new high-tech company that had only gone public a year before. There was no WWW or email for broad public. I phoned or faxed in my little buy-order. The stock seemed to be a risky flyer and overpriced. In fact we were only a few months away from October and Black Monday, the big crash everybody remembered with the greatest pain until the Dot-Com bust. But I held onto that bit of stock. You may have heard of the company. It's called Microsoft. I still have a lot of that stock. I knew a couple of people who worked for them in project management in the early days of Bellevue, too.

Some time later I ran a small IT department. But we mainly did on-site Windows 3.1 and hardware (mostly 486s) support and training for about 600 users in a fair-size geographical region. We had a Unix server in the room running some government email. There was a VAX down the hall, but that wasn't ours. I got Novell- and NT-certified. We ran coax crisscross through a large campus. I crimped some of that cable, and some more a year later when got Cat 5. We used to install Microsoft Office across the coax a half-a-kilometer down the way from our server. It would take 1-2 hours to download locally, so we just started the job and went and did something else for a while. I remember the time I showed my boss's boss how easy it was to crack into the government server and steal or trash the payroll data for a few thousand employees. He didn't thank me. Instead he threatened to fire me! But — no irony here — I'm certainly not trying to compete with your obviously consummate computer experience and skills. In any case I don't see the point of this turn of the discussion beyond reminiscing. Nevertheless, that's what I'll continue to do now.

Oh, but that's right, you want to think I don't have any idea about what drives computer guys. Well, I've hung out on public Unix servers and interacted with engineers and other peculiar lost souls pretty much daily for 28 years. I like their ilk. I get along with them. I still prefer Usenet to the current-day GUI crap or these forums. Anyway, I know the environment. I put Yggdrasil Linux on my new Pentium in 1993 and I had it dual-booting with Windows 3.1. You may well have been doing it longer. I expect you, as a lifelong professional, to be doing it better. More power to you.

I was just a punter in the day, but I was and still am eager to learn. I haven't done it professionally in 20 years. I only spent a few years at it in a professional guise. I don't have an engineering degree. Even so, I've been in the same room with Stallman and Cliff Stoll, though not together (and I'm sure they wouldn't remember me), e.g. at WELL parties in Sausalito and Berkeley. A friend runs headquarters networking for a Dow Transports company. But I admit I only I have a comp lit degree from Cal with concentrations in English and German, and a law degree. I was the only non-EECS Berkeley alum in circa 1993 to be given access to the EECS department's alumni Linux host, by the way. They ran that thing until just a few — maybe eight? — years ago.

Computers are only one of several time-consuming hobbies for me as of the last couple of decades. I hope that doesn't make me a bad person or somehow unworthy of talking to. The hobby years did include my packaged procmail routines for mail servers, a white-hat project I offered free in the first few years of the last decade. It was an algorithm-based virus catcher. A few thousand people were using it at one point. I still have the two domains I registered for that project (and a bunch of others). I still run a couple of small mailing lists off the hand-rolled code I did for that, too.

But hold on, um, what were we talking about again? Oh, yeah: language. Well, as stated, language is something I do have a degree in, and I'm a hobby linguist when I'm not being a hobbyist computer guy or a hobbyist jazz player. I have a couple of board-feet of books on how language works and three shelves of the kinds of reference works one normally found (in earlier times) only in dusty stacks of larger university libraries. But I hardly look in them anymore now that we have the world online. I won third prize in a national poetry competition once thirty-odd years ago and I got paid a whopping $50 for my published poem. I've edited literary journals and business journals. I've translated medium-length articles and poetry, which is hardest of all to translate. As for neologisms, I had a day devoted to them in a recent seminar I gave. I've run an expat writers' group for twenty years. One of our alumni members won a Nobel this year (in chemistry, however, not lit). No, I'm not trying to claim credit by proximity. I'm merely trying to impart that I know at least something about how language works and that various people of interest are willing to be chummy with me "despite" that, um, odd interest.

But back to geeky stuff, since I'm recalling all this now: I had lunch with Mike Godwin back when he was active in the Berkeley Mac Users Group in the day, and I still have an EFF T-shirt from donating in their charter year, 1990. Now that I think of it, Mitch Kapor was at one or two of The WELL parties too. Naturally Stuart Brand, The WELL's founder, perhaps best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, was there. And Deadheads. Lots and lots and lots of Deadheads at those WELL parties.

I was in Captain Crunch's Alameda apartment near the Oakland Estuary a couple or three times after he invited me over to see his incredible custom-built Mac and a screen that seemed to me at the time to be as big as a VW beetle. I went to Netcom after that, still before the WWW, and I co-founded the Netcom Users Group and we offered shell scripts and a couple of compiled programs to the user community. My userid there was 30,000 lower than Jeff Bezos's, who came during the height of the eternal Septemberists. I didn't know Bezos, but I knew Netcom's owner and I had my run-ins with a certain notorious BOFH there. There were stories on the old Usenet archives about what happened, but they disappeared a few years after Google acquired the Deja archives.

This is all bringing back memories. Back in those Netcom days I had my account visited by Kevin Mitnick in 1995 and he left a telltale sign in my $HOME and that of a few other users. He'd cracked his way in. (I still remember the old difference between "cracked" and "hacked," by the way. That battle is long lost.) Here's an article mentioning Mitnick's having gotten into Netcom: https://www.wired.com/1996/02/catching/

I remember Cantor and Siegel's first Usenet spam. That happened on Netcom. They kicked 'em off. Oh, and I had a guest character named after me on the Highlander TV series, which irked me no end because it made looking for me online much harder. Otherwise, I'm the only one around with my name. One or more of the Hollywood writers saw me posting on Usenet in the day and apparently liked my name for the character. There used to be discussions about that, with some of the writers and the original fans. Those threads were archived as well. They, too, are long gone.

anybody who knows IT doesn't really give a hoot, let alone two, if people use the verb or the noun form.

I dare say Clem might care. At any rate, he's interested in elegance. That's part of what makes Linux Mint great. So are good programmers interested in elegance. That's all this is, but in a different area. Just because it's not your area of interest doesn't mean it's not important. Visitors to these forums are not all hardcore geeks, either. Presentation does mean something.

That clipart quote about language I used from James Nicoll might also be relevant here: Nicoll, who owes a good deal of his fair notereity to that quote, first published it on Usenet in 1990. It's been rehashed ever after on Language Log. LL is essentially the most well-known online discussion forum for geeky language guys, including a couple of the old WELLers. Nicoll used to run a role-playing game store and was a well-known Usenet personality. Not directly a heavy computer guy per se, but aren't other geeks allowed in your club? Nicoll doesn't know me. I have no idea if he would agree with what I wrote or not. Perhaps not. But I dare say that, if he wouldn't, he nonetheless wouldn't be a twat about it.

Oh, and shouldn't the subject be 'Forums log in grammar'?

No. I was referring there to login, the idea. It's a noun, but it's used in that phrase adjectivally. Any noun can double as an adjective in English, as I mentioned somewhere up-thread. (Think of coffee, the thing. Now think of a coffee cup. Voilà! Adjective. And now I think I'm going to go coffee up. Phrasal verb. Ain't language grand?)

Anyway, I was thinking of the noun, so that's what I used. Alternatively, of course I could have written "Forums log-in grammar." In that case I would have used a hyphen, since compound adjectives (here derived from a phrasal verb) are easier to grok when hyphenated. So that has become an RFC — whoops, I mean a suggested convention.

Ultimately, grammar of the good sort has the prime purpose of standardizing things to make communication flow more easily. If your Ethernet cable is wired differently from mine, we're not going to communicate. As with any set of rules, such can be abused, misused, or used to browbeat. I'm generally not interested in that sort of infantilism as to language or human interaction, and that wasn't my intent with this thread.

Incidentally, while you were digging through my words for things to cavil about as some kind of revenge act for your sense of indignance at my perceived pedantry, did you happen to find the paragraph where I wrote the following?

I'm certainly human just like everyone else reading this, and I can err. I'm not here to imply I'm good and someone else is bad. I'm not saying there won't ever be anything to criticize about my writing, style, spelling, or presentation. If you want to find an error I made and be gleeful about it, well, go right ahead. I'm merely suggesting to forums.linuxmint.com that it can (and should) improve the professional look of its site forms.

'Cause it sure doesn't sound as if you did.

Feel free to continue to think disdainfully of me if that's your wish. I expect to continue to think of you as a troll until something more constructive from you changes that view. Meanwhile, I have one more quote to offer:

"When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite." — Winston Churchill

/dr

[catweazel]

That said, I've always taken the view that people who use the word fora are mostly illiterate with a completely unwarranted and overblown sense of self-aggrandisement of their puny command of English

"native English speaking people" I hope, since otherwise the fact that "forum" nor "fora" is an originally nor exclusively English word seems to mostly say something about your personal level of command of anything but English...

Who said it was?

[Moem]

Mod note:
I feel like an introduction is in order here...
Gentlemen, have you met? Catweazel, this is dman; he's new but very promising, and seems to have a good head on his shoulders. I'd say you really ought to give the young man a chance. Get off his case, will you, please.
Dman, meet catweazel; he's our curmudgeon-in-chief, he can be grumpy and cheeky but he knows plenty and he's also helpful, a lot of the time. If he's bothering you, please either ignore or ask the mods to step in, that's what we're for. This is not a cage fight, we have rules here.

I'm sure the two of you will get along swimmingly once you've gotten used to each others personal style. Now please, if you'd be so kind, stay out of each others hair and play nice. Thank you so much!

[catweazel]

You've made a lot of wrong assumptions about me...

Feel free to continue to think disdainfully of me if that's your wish.

Nonsense. I don't have any kind of opinion of you or anyone else from mere words in a forum post. No doubt the mods will be around shortly so I'll leave it there and wish you well.

[catweazel]

curmudgeon-in-chief

Signatured.

[xenopeek]

The suggestion was answered by me and gm10 on the first page of this topic, as to how and where to get it implemented. Further discussion about it here seems not very useful as the decision whether to implement this or not is upstream with phpBB. Proponents of the suggestion could spend their time more productive by writing a concise and clear improvement request, or working on the patch themselves.

Moem beat me to it but catweazel, can you please hold off on the one-line and antagonizing remarks? I don't see this as friendly or constructive in this discussion.