Bug#1020248: [Git][dbnpolicy/policy][master] 2 commits: Use stanza to refer to deb822 parts instead of paragraph
Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
> I disagree with this point of view. In my own case I had to take a
> dictionary to learn what a stanza is, while the word paragraph is surely
> know at least to anybody who studied English in a classroom.
> In my own field, (molecular biology) we (or at least some of us) are
> putting some effort to eliminate jargon and use simple words that makes
> written documents more accessible to the public. This is why I prefered
> paragraph to stanza when working on the specification.
This is a very valid point, and I appreciate you bringing this up!
My personal opinion is that I don't think jargon is necessarily good or
bad. It has advantages and drawbacks.
One drawback that you're correctly pointing out is accessibility: jargon
can make things that would otherwise be comprehensible harder to
understand. It can also be off-putting and alienating to people, and thus
make it harder for them to get involved in a shared project.
The advantage of jargon, and the reason why jargon exists and why humans
keep inventing it, is that it's precise. You don't need as much context
to disambiguate what a sentence may be talking about. I do find the use
of paragraph the way we were previously using it to be confusing,
particularly given that the paragraphs contain fields which in turn
contain actual paragraphs in the normal sense of the term. In some
contexts, precision doesn't matter, but Debian Policy is one place where
we should try to be precise.
Stanza has the significant drawback that it's dictionary definition is
specific to poetry. In poetry, it's a close analog to how we're using it,
but that does make it somewhat obscure. It does have the minor advantage
of being terminology that was already in use for exactly this construction
in deb822 files.
I don't want to keep using paragraph, but I'd be open to some other term
that Guillem was also open to (I think matching the terminology in dpkg is
very important). Section or block are commonly used for things like this,
but aren't very precise, so I'm not that enthused by them.
> If I were to redo such a specification from scratch, I would ask
> non-European language speakers their opinion too.
I'm definitely interested in that opinion from anyone who is listening in!
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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