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Re: DevRef English writing style advice, was: incomprehensible sentence in exim4-config.pot.



Quoting MJ Ray (mjr@phonecoop.coop):
> Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
> > Such neologisms haven't been promoted very hardly and they are even
> > been debated among d-w.
> 
> News to me. Can you point to a recent debate of them, please?

Recent? None. There have been some discussions back in 2005, IIRC,
which you can probably find in the list archive. My memory tells me
that a general agreemnt wasn't reached at that moment.

> You put the feminine as an optional extra in parentheses?  Ho!
> Way to show equality(!) ;-)
> 
> I think that could be written "s/he" but I think it says "hey,
> I'm indecisive" or, worse, "I care about political correctness
> more than easy reading".

The latter isn't bad for me. I mean, it's very common now to see
"political correctness" with negative connotations. Usually, when
someone mentions the term "political correctness" it usually
implicitely means that (s)/s/he dosn't really agree with his/her
contradictor and uses "political correctness" as a nice way to avoid
the debate.

So, yes, I care about people not assuming that I'm more writing my
documentations and/or mails for a male audience. One may call it
"political correctness", it doesn't change my concerns. Actually, I'm
personnally proud of trying to be as politically correct as possible
with regards to that matter.


...which, btw, is another argument to remove that "political
correctness" thing from the Developer's Reference.


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