An unhandled exception in the English language

While no one expects a language that formed organically via iteration and evolution to be free of logical errors, over time conventions have been formed to deal with most of them such that for the most part there is a “right” way of saying something and a “wrong” way, even when there’s no obvious rule to cover the use case in mind.

The BBC has an excellent article with some examples and even past attempts at creating rules to deal with these cases.

“Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an osadd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.”

My personal favorite “it’ll blow your mind” rule is with regards to ablaut reduplication:

You are utterly familiar with the rule of ablaut reduplication. You’ve been using it all your life. It’s just that you’ve never heard of it. But if somebody said the words zag-zig, or ‘cross-criss you would know, deep down in your loins, that they were breaking a sacred rule of language. You just wouldn’t know which one. All four of a horse’s feet make exactly the same sound. But we always, always say clip-clop, never clop-clip. Every second your watch (or the grandfather clock in the hall makes the same sound) but we say tick-tock, never tock-tick. You will never eat a Kat Kit bar. The bells in Frère Jaques will forever chime ‘ding dang dong’.

But what do you do when two rules or conventions clash? And what does that have to do with programming or computer science?

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Hectuple is Not a Real Word

Repeat after me: “Hectuple is not a real word. There is no such thing as a hectuple.”

NeoSmart user David Q. wrote in to let us know that our usage of the word “hectuple” on the EasyBCD download page to refer to a 7-entry multi-boot environment is, quite frankly, wrong:

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Ubuntu 7.04: Fiesty or Feisty, Which is it?

Ubuntu is a great Linux distro and all, but couldn’t they have chosen a better code-name for the latest version!? As everyone knows, geeks and nerds are the worlds biggest obsessive-compulsive, nit-picking grammar-Nazis, and they’re also the ones (at the moment) most likely to be using Linux. So, why on Earth is Ubuntu 7.04 called Feisty Fawn and not Fiesty Fawn?

Out of all the Fxxxxx Fxxxxx names Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical Ltd. could have picked for their all-the-rage Linux distribution, it had to be the (only?) one that breaks the infamous i-before-e rule, didn’t it?

‘I’ before ‘E’, except after ‘C’, or when sounding like ‘A’, as in “neighbor” or “weigh.”

 

Everyone who speaks English was made to memorize that as a child (well, if you’re British you would’ve memorized it “neighbour” instead, but that’s not the point ;), yet here we are: grown coders using software built on exceptions to grammatical laws!

Let’s take a quick look at some of the other names Ubuntu could’ve used:

What wonderful code-names! What beautiful, grammatically-sound, alliterations! Maybe they just didn’t notice the grammatical misnomer – plus, there’s always next time. Here’s hoping for more great Ubuntu releases with gramatically-correct names!