On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 01:00:58PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 02:54:49AM +1100, Drew Parsons wrote: > > For what it's worth, "in the future" sounds right to me, > > ^^^ > > sounds better to my ear than "...future release..." :) > > But does it sound better than "in future", e.g., "In future, the > Americans should try harder not to let a kumquat assume the office of > President."? > > If it does to you, then maybe what I'm thinking of is a U.K. thing. > I think I see them as different usages. Your "In future" phrase is positioned as a supplementary clause, so grammatically it could be omitted in way that wouldn't work with the "in the future" at the end of the sentence. I don't know if this is technically true in a grammatical sense, but it's how I "feel" the correctness. What I mean is, I feel the following sentences are both OK: "In future, you should do this." "I will do this in the future." whereas these feel wrong: "In the future, you should do this." "I will do this in future." Actually, no, now I've talked it through, I think I see what the rule is. It's the difference between the future as an abstract concept, and a specific (though unknown) point in time which happens to occur later than the current point in time. Grammatically, this is the difference between "imperfect" and "perfect" verbs, which is important in day-to-day usage of Russian verbs, among other things. It's the difference between "I was doing it (but never finished doing it)" and "I did it (and finished doing it)". "in future" means you're talking about something that will (or should) generally be done, without claiming it to have actually been done at any particular point of time. "in the future" means it will have been done at some particular point in time. In the case of XFree86's Xprt server eventually working, we can say that there will be a specific release made at some particular point in time, and therefore I believe "in the future" is correct. That's I explain my choice of phrase, anyway :) Drew -- PGP public key available at http://people.debian.org/~dparsons/drewskey.txt Fingerprint: A110 EAE1 D7D2 8076 5FE0 EC0A B6CE 7041 6412 4E4A
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