Re: Silent hijacking and stripping records from changelog
Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk> writes:
> Quoting Jonathan Dowland (2024-04-17 17:29:11)
>> On Wed Apr 17, 2024 at 10:39 AM BST, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>>> Interesting: Can you elaborate on those examplary contributions of
>>> yours which highlighted a need for maintaining all Haskell packages in
>>> same git repo?
>> My Haskell contributions (which I did not enumerate) are tangential to
>> the use of a monorepo. But it strikes me as an odd choice for you to
>> describe them as examplary. Paired with you seeming to file me on "the
>> opposing side", your mail reads to me as unnecessarily snarky. Please
>> do not CC me for listmail.
> I can see why it might come across as snarky. It was not intended that
> way.
> I just meant to write describe your contributions as examples, but I
> realize now that with your emphasizing it that I wrongly described them
> as extraordinary examples.
I suspect (based on Jonas's domain) this is one of those subtle problems
when English isn't your first language. The English language is full of
weird connotation traps.
For anyone else who may not be aware of this subtle shade of meaning, an
English dictionary will partly lie to you about the common meaning of
"exemplary" (which I assume is what Jonas meant by "examplary"). Yes, it
means "serving as an example," but it specifically means serving as an
*ideal* example: something that should be held up as being particularly
excellent or worthy of imitation.
If you ask someone "could you elaborate on your exemplary contributions,"
a native English speaker is going to assume you're being sarcastic about
90% of the time. In common usage, that phrase usually carries a tone
closer to "please do enlighten us about your amazing contributions" than
what Jonas actually intended.
I keep having to remind myself of this in Debian since many Debian
contributors have *excellent* written English skills (certainly massively
bettern than my language skills in any language other than English), so
it's easy to fall into the trap of assuming that they're completely
fluent, but English is full of problems like this that will trip up even
highly advanced non-native speakers.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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