User talk:Jerzy/Archive 00

Non-Native Speakers and other Topics of Hopefully Continuing Interest

Note to non-native speakers of English

Years ago, i got stuck in my brain the idea that there's something wrong about modern English singling out the first-person singular pronoun to be spelled with a capital letter. So i spell it without the capital -- except at the beginning of a sentence, or when i'm not the sole author. If you follow my example, native speakers will just figure you're ignorant of the basics.

Good Advice to Anyone

Hello Jerzy, welcome to Wikipedia. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian. You can learn more on the how to edit page. The naming conventions and style guide pages are also useful. There is a sandbox which you can use to experiment in.

If you have any questions, see the help pages or add a question to the village pump. Angela 07:19, 8 Sep 2003 (UTC)

"As of"

If you've noticed weirdness in the form of links that include the words "as of", may i recommend reading Wikipedia:As of.

Some interaction regarding it follows:

as of 2003

...[re Innocence Project ]... I restored the "as of 2003" link; its purpose is not widely understood, but it is discussed at length at Wikipedia talk:As of, which is can also be found by looking at the talk page of the Redirect page (instead of just the page redirected to) of any of the "As of ..." links. A little confusing, sorry about that. --Jerzy 06:22, 2003 Dec 17 (UTC)

Sorry again: better yet, Wikipedia:As of; i'm trying to figure out why i didn't lead myself more naturally to that; maybe it was my own fault. --Jerzy

Reply

Ah, thanks! Didn't know about that practice. Good idea. Tualha 01:03, 18 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Infinite monkey as-of

In the edit summary for Infinite monkey theorem, you wrote: (removed link to as of 2003. Anyone who wants to update it may, but the effort i could have spent elsewhere instead of checking is more valuable than an actual update)

I don't understand what this means (and I suspect that if I did I'd disagree with it). Could you explain it to me, please? —Paul A 02:37, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hi, Paul. I'm answering here and will merely link to it from your talk: We may well not agree, and want to move our exchange from here to an article-talk page for a broader discussion. In that case, we'd probably find it easier to move an integrated block embodying the whole discussion, rather than pasting it back together.

I was of course very terse, and i've not yet mastered the haiku of the edit summary, tho i'm becoming a serious student of it. In the course of answering your question, i will have to first say why i devalue the "Attempts at simulation" section:

It's seriously under-written; anyone who thinks it's worth the distraction from more useful information should be willing to write more than those two sentences. It's in passive voice (always a trouble sign) because converting it to active voice would require the unencyclopedic word "somebody". It has only the when, and needs the who, the why, and most of the what. As to what, it sounds like a distributed-computing exercise, especially in light of the "anyone" reference, but there is no information as to the technical aspects that would, for instance, make it a good section for a distributed computing article to link to. Which is the thing "outlined above" that is being attempted? I also think the section is under some obligation to make clear that this is not what the silly short story suggests, "support[ing] the sciences" or "test[ing] that theory". (Neither success nor failure would advance science, and this is a mathematical law, not a testable scientific theory.) What kind of attempt is this, the kind of attempt a 5-year-old makes at walking across a continent, or something that rests on a computation of the expected computer-years required to produce all of Shakespeare, and a plausible if optomistic plan for assembling and retaining those resources. What counts as succeeding: does each play have to be typed by one simulated monkey without interruption? Do plays count when patched together out of complete acts or scenes, each by one monkey? Or is every simulated page, or every speech sufficient? Oh, and is the keystroke rate 1 per nanosecond per monkey? If this is an "attempt", it has to avoid fraudulent attempts to appear to be where success occurred, so we also need to know that serious efforts are being made to preclude fraud.
What is being attempted and accomplished adds nothing to the article, which is about the history of a quirky idea that keeps recurring as a thought experiment and as mathematics, and they this section is, as far as it indicates, not about either of those, but about the utterly irrelevant stunt of going thru the motions without the charm or the rigor of its predecessors. If there are articles being written about this, that would make the articles (in contrast to the attempt) interesting in the terms of the article's subject, but there is not the slightest hint of coverage beyond the fact that someone is able to get enough information somewhere to write, and to update, it. I'm probably so out of the loop that my not having heard any slightest hint of it is of no weight, but i assume there would be some hint of coverage in the article if it were getting any; in the absence of serious coverage, this has no relationship to Kolmogorov, Swift, & Co.
Even if the section had some value to the article or the world, the updates do not. 13 characters rather than just 10: I-S T-H-I-S A D-A-G-G-E-R. I'll blow my brains out from boredom before this news even manages to distract me, let alone amuse me.
The purpose of As of... entries is to facilitate updating by people who would not otherwise do it on the article with that link. The phrase "As of" or equivalents can be used without linking it, and no one is going to update this who isn't already hooked on it -- not even if there were some means to verify the basic story, let alone update it (what would i search, "infinite monkeys" random Shakespeare, maybe? I can't think of what exclusion to specify, to keep out the hundreds of years of more interesting history. The link accomplishes nothing.
Are we really going to expect even one update beyond 2004? You expect this to last even 18 months? If it does, the pathetic standards of people who can sustain that interest make it less significant, and less worthy of coverage, year by year.
The crux of this is that the effect the link does have is to take up the time of people who are trying to update As of...s that are worthwhile, in araticles that don't have an obsessive following. This link is vandalism.

I don't personally begrudge the short time i devoted to my inspection and edit (or i'd have replied even more tersely, rather than at this length). But i object strenuously on behalf of the editor community.

I urge you to update the section to your heart's content, but stop pointlessly disrupting others' work by putting back the link. (And i'll refactor this out if i put it on an article- or meta-talk page, but have more respect for yourself than letting yourself be associated with a section that is allowed to stand with its lame current content.) --Jerzy 06:57, 2004 Feb 17 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to explain. Yes, you're right.

With regard to the "haiku of the edit summary", here's a suggestion: if one's explanation of an edit is too long or complicated to fit easily into the edit summary, an alternative is to summarise the edit as ([made an edit] - see talk page for details), and then put the explanation on the article's talk page. —Paul A 02:39, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Grammar & Usage Quibbles

"Not to mention its being hard... "

An alert but confused user took issue with the phrase above (which appears on Jerzy), holding that an apostrophe is required and thus making the word it's. Hopefully i will, unlike Pascal, make it thru the day that it will take before i have time to point out in some detail why the apostrophe is not only unnecessary, but impermissible. Not to mention what is grammatically wrong with that sentence. --Jerzy 13:47, 2003 Nov 2 (UTC)

Wise use of sentence fragments

The rule i did violate calls for writing (outside of titles and direct quotations) in full sentences. (Both of my last two uses of "Not to mention..." are in sentence fragments, rather than in sentences.) I consider that rule important in formal writing (e.g, Wikipedia articles), but dispensible, as long as ambiguity is avoided, in informal writing (e.g. most Wikipedia talk). And violating it can keep the pace up. And draw attention, without extra words, to the relationship between one complete thought and an "afterthought" that could (in theory) have been included in the same sentence with it. Like this fragment, and the two immediately before it, not to mention both of the times i used "Not to mention..." to begin a sentence fragment.

The problem of "its"

The alert user in question may be confused about the meaning of "it's". One of the most common written-language errors in English is failure to distinguish between two identically pronounced words, namely:

It's, which is always a contraction for "it is".
Its, which, with exceptions too rare to mention further, is always a possessive form of the personal pronoun "it".

All the personal pronouns lack apostrophes, including

adjectivial forms such as my, her, and your (and of course the sense of its that started this discussion), and
noun-like possessive forms, such as mine, hers, and yours (not to mention the other, noun-like sense of its).

By the way, the rule is "the possessives of personal pronouns lack apostrophes", but possessives of non-personal pronouns behave like nouns. Examples are

everyone's head,
another's head,
one's head,
the other's head, and
the others' heads.

(It's not that important to ask why those are the rules. I lack formal linguistics training and don't know, beyond "that happens to be how this particular language evolved", but it's worth saying that that's all the justification such a rule needs: this is the way educated English-speakers write when they are striving for clarity, and your best chance of making yourself understood is to avoid the confusion that goes with playing by a different set of language rules. It takes some extra effort, but

with practice the effort gets less (for instance, if you spell i lowercased, as i do, enough times, it takes no effort at all to remember to do so),
it seems to involve less effort than ignoring the rules and having confusing meta-discussions to repair the important ambiguities that sometimes are introduced by so-called language errors, and
it is certainly less alienating than being the occasion for those meta-discussions.)

The gerund problem

The other thing that may have confused the alert user is especially confusing in English because we suffix verbs with -ing for two entirely different purposes. The corresponding words in as closely related a language as German are usually (almost always?) distinguishable:

"Laughing is good.", using a gerund, is Das LachEN stimmt wohl. (Hmm, is the gerund distinguishable from the infinitive in German? I'd translate that back literally as "To laugh does you good."), but
"A laughing cow...", using a participle, is Ein lachENDes Kuh... (unless i've messed up on the gender)

If you know a foreign language, you may have your own examples. The English gerund form of an verb, which serves the same grammatical roles as a noun, looks, but for syntax and other context, just like the present-participial form of the same verb, which serves the same grammatical roles as an adjective.

I consider this possibility because the desire to put the apostrophe into "its being" may have reflected the idea that the pronoun it needs the auxiliary verb is to connect it to the participial verb being.

(I may get the terminology and the linguistic theory wrong here, so i don't hope for this treatment to be considered authoritative.) IIRC, i was taught 6 tenses (three of them "perfect" in the sense of the action being "perfected", meaning "completed", by the time-frame the sentence applies to.) To the great confusion of non-native speakers, we say "I'm repairing my car" in three senses. I think of one of them as the progressive (is the technical term "imperfect"?) tense: i have a wrench on a bolt, and five minutes ago i disconnected the battery, and in five minutes i'll lift the starter out. All of that is part of what i mean in saying "I'm repairing my car." It's probably the same tense when i say the same words while i'm on the front porch with a cold one in my hand, and the driveway is full of tools and auto parts. But clearly it's a second (or third) tense when, hearing the weather forecast say "cloudy tomorrow, snow the day after", my friend says "Let's go to the movies tomorrow" and i reply, shaking my head, "I'm shopping for snow tires, and restocking my emergency kit." The same tense is used by a high school student who says "I'm going to the U." I think of this usage, of supposed present- (or continued-) action language to describe future action, as a "bootleg future tense"; its odd status is highlighted by the bizarre alternative form "I'm going to go to the U". (In an area where i am even further from being an expert, i won't go into the analogous dialect usage "... fi'nn'a fix ...".)

I mention all of that last 'graph partly bcz i'm unsure whether using the participle as an adjective ("a continuing concern") derives from the "progressive tense". The alternative is that the so-called progressive tense is kind of a quasi-tense that we've ginned up just by using the linking verb "is" and participial adjectives such as "continuing" together often enough. We say say things like "Our concern about this is a continuing one" and then "Our concern about this is continuing" often enough that we perhaps start imagining there is another tense involved. (My understanding is that linguists actually regard such evolution as the way languages gain their valuable complexities, and are much more interested in which usage came first and evolved into the other, than in drawing a line between a tense-like construction and a true tense. So maybe i shouldn't care about the answer to the question i just raised.)

To see that no apostrophe is required or pemitted, parallel "I regretted its being hard for you" with "He appreciated my baking him a cake." (And remember what it's means.)

In the case at hand, BTW, something else should (barring confusion) have tipped off the alert user, if "...it is being..." was the construction they intended. "Not to mention" must be followed by a noun (or a phrase serving the grammatical role of a noun), but "it is being hard..." is a full clause. It is able to stand alone as a sentence, and able to be combined into a larger sentence with a semicolon, a conjunction, or a relative prounoun like "that", but not able to serve the roles of a noun. (Writing "... [n]ot to mention that it's being hard..." is grammatical (except for the sentence fragment; see above), but it's lousy writing, and the alert user would be not only confused but uncharitable in attributing that intent to me.)

In any case, part of my concern is that, as William Safire wrote in his On Language column in the New York Times Sunday magazine section not too long ago (i.e., this year; maybe last month), the use of an adjectivial possessive pronoun before a gerund became standard relatively recently (i.e., well after Gutenberg). IMO that contributes to its being less well understood than other constructions.

I suspect the "possessive before gerund" rule is really aimed against a misleading construction: My mom appreciates my calling her, but she loves me calling her. She even loves me smashing her china. But she hates my smashing her china, and her smashing her (own) china, and i'm not sure whether i said she loves me when it's i or she who's smashing her china. IMO, the grammatical rules are that a noun or nominative pronoun precedes a participle (or should), and an adjective or adjectivial possessive pronoun precedes a gerund (or should). But maybe the usage rule should be

Avoid the noun- (or nominative-pronoun-) participle construction (in favor of, for instance, participle-noun), since it both is confusing and can be mistaken for the confusing and ambiguous noun-gerund construction;
conversely, avoid the ambiguous noun- (or nominative-pronoun-) gerund construction, even if you think it is grammatically sound, but
don't hesitate to use the adjective- (or adjectivial=possesive-pronoun-) gerund construction.

Articles?

I didn't cite the good WP page i found that comments on Its/It's, but i'll look for it again & add a link here.

I encourage someone better prepared than i to use this for text or ideas in WP article(s); the example of Pascal notwithstanding (i.e. unless someone sends me a round tuit, i may not get around to it for a while), they might do WP a solid by pre-empting me from doing so. [grin]

-- Jerzy 01:20, 2003 Nov 4 (UTC)

Like vs. As

I wrote "Like this fragment...", and then, much later, thought long and hard about whether i should instead have begun "As with this fragment". I ended up settling on using "as" rather than "like", but i found it interesting, and in the end illuminating, that i had so much trouble being sure.

The rule in question was "Like is a preposition, and its object must function as a noun; as is a subordinating conjunction, and what follows it must complete the clause by being a subject and a predicate." Superficially, the rule seems complied with: Like is followed by "this fragment", a noun phrase without a predicate. But the fact that "like" follows a period (or full stop) complicates the situation; in fact, i was in the midst of arguing that both my uses of like were in effect parts of an ungainly hypothetical sentence (of around a hundred words), beginning "I consider". In that context, what is like the two fragments has to be "violating [the rule]". And the only relevant way that violating the rule can be like the fragments is if (as my text claims) they all "keep the pace up, and draw attention [in a specified direction]. The fact that i could have said "as this fragment does," refering more explicitly to the parallel action, raises the question of what i was trying to communicate: was i really trying point out the abstract parallel between "violating" and "this fragment", because of what they do? Or was i counting on the reader to supply a missing verb, and interpret what i wrote as they would "like this fragment does"?

I think, on reflection, that comparing the abstraction of "violating" with the concrete fragments that do violate is demanding, and secretly i was counting on the reader to insert the predicate "does" in their own minds - which means i should have used "as" rather than "like". (Of course, constructions like "The balloons rose, as mist in the morning" only sound good in poetry, so in practice the only practical and grammatical approach (without changing the whole shape of the sentence and the fragments following it) is "As this fragment, and the two immediately before it, do...." More to follow (but i think so far so good).

Text i may need to quote further from:

The rule i did violate calls for writing (outside of titles and direct quotations) in full sentences. (Both of my last two uses of "Not to mention..." are in sentence fragments, rather than in sentences.) I consider that rule important in formal writing (e.g, Wikipedia articles), but dispensible, as long as ambiguity is avoided, in informal writing (e.g. most Wikipedia talk). And violating it can keep the pace up. And draw attention, without extra words, to the relationship between one complete thought and an "afterthought" that could (in theory) have been included in the same sentence with it. Like this fragment, and the two immediately before it, not to mention both of the times i used "Not to mention..." to begin a sentence fragment.

Pascal

I mentioned Blaise Pascal bcz of Pascal's Last Theorem. That is the ironic (and presumably doubly inaccurate) standard name for a conjecture in mathematical number theory; it was formulated long before his time and proven (in the late 20th century) only long after it. Pascal thought (probably mistakenly) that he knew an elegant way to prove this conjecture, and wrote in his copy of a relevant book that its margin was too small to hold the proof. While he probably wrote that more than a day before his death, no proof of it by him has ever been found, he never corrected what he had written, and it seems like a natural parable about taking on responsibilities that take a lot longer than anticipated.

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