Re: GR Proposal: replace "Chairman" with "Chair" throughout the Debian Constitution
Hello,
On 21 July 2016 at 10:15, Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> wrote:
> Hi Marga,
>
> I second this amendment, although it introduces a minor awkwardness:
>
> On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 03:27:56PM +0200, Margarita Manterola wrote:
>> - <li>The Technical Committee and/or its Chairman;</li>
>> + <li>The Technical Committee and/or its Chair;</li>
>
> A "Chairman" is a person. A "Chair" may be an object.
>
> I don't think anyone will misinterpret your proposed new wording into
> thinking the TC has a physical chair that someone sits on, but the
> s/Chairmain/Chair/ you apply does to me seem to introduce some
> grammatical ambiguity that could make the text of the constitution less
> clear than it might be.
>
> Since I'm not a native English speaker, I'll assume for now that it's
> just me and that there's no problem; but if other people do feel the
> same way about this, perhaps now's the right time to do something about
> it? Once this GR passes, it's going to be hard to fix that...
>
Word chair has two meanings in English. One is the object to sit on,
the other is the person in charge of a meeting or of an organisation.
Capitalisation and context make it unambiguous to interpret only as a
role, rather than an object.
--
Regards,
Dimitri.
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