Quite amusing :)

And to think most engineers I know run away from English. Until it comes back to haunt you this way!

Heh, even talking about "flowing an object" sounds dodgy..

Dave...I don't think this is what people meant when they said they wanted a grammar checker in Safari :o)

I guess with the focus on such matters as this, all the hard work has been finished ;)

Roll on Safari 1.0!

My favorite: HTTP_REFERER

Yeah, when I refer to HTTP_REFERER in documentation, I'm compelled to follow it with "(sic)". :)

-boo

Oooh, just remembered something from childhood. In the Peanuts book "I Need All The Friends I Can Get" three of the gang are talking (I think it was Charlie, Lucy, and Linus). Since I forget who was who, I'll use letters:

A: Lookit, lookit!
B: I'm lookiting.
C: "Lookiting?"

:)

Heh, "flowing an object"...

What is the Matrix?

:)

Right you are, Dale - you are in control of the board.
The remaining categories...

If you stop something after the first iteration, how many times have you gone round the loop?

Strictly, since 'to iterate' means 'to repeat' and you can't repeat something 'til you've done it at least once, you should have gone round the loop twice. But the jargon meaning has shifted so if you're talking to computer scientists they'd say 'once'.

I think you're not going far enough in adopting the new terminology. You said "I don't get why this isn't laying out right!", but clearly you should have said "I don't get why this isn't layouting right!"

"If you stop something after the first iteration, how many times have you gone round the loop? . . . if you're talking to computer scientists they'd say 'once'."

Those crazies start counting at zero, too.

Very amusing :)

[OT]
sorry to go aff topic, but does anyone know a way to add a file type to the list of "Safe" files that Safari will open automagically upon successful download? emusic.com uses an .emp file type for their "one-click" album downloads, and I'd like to get Safari to recognize it as a Safe file.

If this seems an inappropriate place to ask this question, feel free to ignore my post. Thanks!

I don't see the problem with "layouted." It's a perfectly cromulent word.

So that explains why using HTTP_REFERRER never worked properly. I always coded it myself, then when it didn't work, I'd copy/paste the variable name from the web.

I never really thought about why it wasn't working... sonuvabitch...

Funny.

As a developer with an undergraduate degree in English Lit, I'm sure I infuriate my colleagues with little grammar tidbits like this.

When are we going to have smooth scrolling in Safari like IE for Windows has???

So when are we getting Tabbed Brow... wait, never mind.

When is Hyatt going to wipe my...

Stop complaining, people...he doesn't control everything.

Heh. Good to see that someone notices stuff like this. I once worked on an inventory system that had a library called Parts Catagory. We shipped the product for two years with a typo in a file name.

Developer spelling, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation in dialog boxes has always been an adventure, and that's not even counting debug dialog boxes that shouldn't come up but which ship and have messages like "This Should never Happening" and "No Dummy! Don't Do THat!".

And comments in code are great, but it's nicer if they actually mean something to someone other than the person who wrote them.

It seems every time I shut down my Windows XP box I see "You shouldn't see this" as it shuts down processes. Sigh.

I've long wished that IDEs would be smart enough to spell check comments, looking around for variable names in the immediate area to use as an ignore list. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard.

There was once a product (IMHO produced by barebones software) called polish it would spellcheck all strings in your code + make sure all your windows fit on low resolution screens, we could use something similar today.

While I'm at it, another "me too" bug report - news.walla.co.il is all messed up in the latest safari release. Not only that, but if you open the page in a tab then the hebrew title is printed backwards (creating a link to it in the bookmarks bar also comes out backwards).

Apart from that major kudos Dave, and good luck with your fight for the correct use of the english language :)

I think blogging software is trying to push people towards new technologies, so we try new things. It's the latest wave of web page creation software and the easiest way to put up a constantly updated description of your cat's antics. Not that it wasn't odd that Movable Type's default css didn't validate.

Speaking of new things, there's now a Movable Type wiki (http://www.virtualvenus.org/wiki/) which includes complete install instructions for MacOSX self-hosting. However, the unordered list on the front page is extending past the edge of the box on Safari...

Not exactly "bad english" but never mind. What really bugs me are the spellings of "Mac OS X":
MacOSX
macOSx
MacOS X
Mac OSX
MACosX
MacOsX
...

Is is really that hard?

What bugs me is when folks refer to it as "the Mac OS X", as in, "Everyone is waiting for a new version of the Mac OS X."

Mr. Sharumpe

I think "Layouted" is a Northern Europeanism: I worked with a bunch of Danes on a big publishing-systems project a few years ago, and they had process states for "layouted" in their app and docs. We managed to excise the term from user-visible screens and docs. No harm done, and I'm sure we butchered their Danish far more than they harmed our English. Heck, even the English don't like our (US) English ;-)

Frederik - what's wrong with MacOS X? I often type it as MacOS X instead of Mac OS X, because MacOS is a common way to talk about the Macintosh OS

"what's wrong with MacOS X?"

What's wrong with it is that it's wrong. ;)

(And Frederik, you left out OS-9 and OS-X:)

While it's true that "MacOS" has been in common use for a long time (since System 6 at least, if not earlier), I consider it to clearly mean the system which came before OS X, and not OS X.

"I have a 6100/60; I run MacOS."
"I have a 6100/60; I run the Mac OS."
"I have a TiBook; I run Mac OS X."
"I have a TiBook; I run OS X."

-Walter

The problem with variations on "Mac OS X" and the like is that they're all different strings for most (all?) search engines.

The old Bell Labs Unix kernel sources were full of references to the "kernal". Drove me nuts.

Geoff Nunberg (IIRC) argues that the formation of works like "layouted" is the result of a natural progression in English. In baseball, for example, we say that a batter "flied out", not "flew out". The reason, according to Nunberg (or whoever) is that "flied" is derived not directly from the verb "to fly", but rather from "fly ball" or simply the noun form "fly" (he hit a fly, grounder, blooper). So the normal inflections of the verb aren't particularly relevant, and instead we verb the noun "fly", and say "flied out".

Mutatis mutandis, we verb the noun "layout" and get "layouted".

Naetheless, it sounds completely weird.

"Mutatis mutandis, we verb the noun "layout" and get "layouted"."

verbing weirds language

A thread after my own heart.

I have lost count of the number of times I've seen 'your' when the writer obviously means 'you're' - or is it only in the UK that we still use this?

And as for people who use 'amount of' when they mean 'number of'... Even the BBC perpetrates that one now.

Hmm, haven't seen the 'amount of' vs 'number of' but it sounds like a counterpart to 'less' vs 'fewer' (which I've seen and heard countless times, no pun intended).

Jonathan Lundell's thinking of Steven Pinker. The "flied out" example is from The Language Instinct. A fine book which everyone should read.