[LAU] OT: Top Posting [Was: Linux compatible keybord controller?]

Ralf Mardorf ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net
Fri Jan 3 10:21:27 UTC 2014


On Fri, 2014-01-03 at 22:16 +1300, Chris Bannister wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 03, 2014 at 10:41:29AM +0530, Rustom Mody wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 11:17 PM, Ralf Mardorf
> > <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> wrote:
> > > I will be quiet now, since I try to learn not to follow my bad habit to
> > > write too much mails and to reply to myself :D.
> > >
> > > Just a nice joke, how far opinions could go:
> > >
> > > http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2013-December/255217.html
> > >
> > > :)
> > 
> > Thanks Ralf for making me laugh
> 
> Do you have to be a non English speaker to understand it?
> I get the '@' symbol means 'at', but don't understand 'get' the reply,
> despite it being poor English. Or is that part of the joke?
> #mystified

It's absurd to open a thread about it. International mailing lists are
used by people who aren't native speakers too. @ is often used in this
way, so we non-native speakers adopt it. Everybody understands what it
is used for, even if it's poor English. A correction, how to speak/write
better English could be send off-list, since on this list the @-sign is
seldom "misused" and even if it's (mis)used, the intention isn't to be
impolite.

You know that on the Debian user list it became a thread when an
Australien native English speaker doesn't reply in Oxford English and
even American English from time to time lead to a thread about wrong
usage of the English language, with several replies that just add a
smiley or +1.

Are Linux mailing lists for Oxford English speaking poets?

"Inherit The Wind" with Spencer Tracy does mention, that it's only
important that we understand each other, the style how we use a
language, resp. the words we used are less important.

However, top posting is bad, I explained it off-list and sure, Robins
explanation to the list is good, but any further discussions about the
style, how to write emails is useless and only discourage users to join
mailing lists.

I dislike German journalists speaking bad German, e.g. when they say
"Meter", while it should be "Metern", or when they claim that a "Fenster
ist auf", instead of a "Fenster ist offen" but I also dislike when it
becomes a thread in a German Linux forum, when somebody wrote "das"
instead of "dass".

The language police isn't aware what language is for. Language is used
for communication, not to show how good or bad our education was.

Feel free to reply off-list ;).

Regards,
Ralf



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