Re: [OT] Indian C programmers and "u"

From: Thomas Stegen (tstegen_at_cis.strath.ac.uk)
Date: 11/27/03 

Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2003 12:17:29 +0000

Jeremy Yallop wrote:

> This is simply untrue. Any native English speaker will understand "in
> general" to mean "in most cases", although it also has other meanings,
> particularly in a more formal context. That you are apparently
> ignorant of such meanings illustrates my point.

I am not ignorant of any such meanings, which if you read later posts
you will see. The start of it all was someone saying something like "in
general, the order of include files matter." How can anyone, in a
technical context, in a technical newsgroup of programmers no less, fail
to see that this means that "unless you do something special the order
matters." This brings us to another matter alltogether. It is,
hopefully, trivially false that order matters for most real headers
files. Anyone wishing to hold a fruitful discussion should choose the
most likely and correct interpretetation in ambigous situations. It is
called the principle of charity. That someone well versed in programming
absolutely refuses to admit that general can mean "unless otherwise
specified" implies only quarrelsome behaviour to me. When the objector
to my usage then starts playing the completely destructive definition
game my suspicions are confirmed and my goodwill meter does not exactly
go off the charts.

It is like the difference between "in general header files shall be
written in such a way that order does not matter" and "in general
header files should be written in such a way that order does not
matter."

> Here are the first
> few uses of "in general" that I found in the British National Corpus:

[snip]

> In none of these examples does "in general" have the meaning you
> claim. It is used as a qualifier, and means approximately "most".

Neither do they dispute my claim (and when you first bring up dictionary
examples, yes there are many many that supports me and us. I say us
because I use the colloquial meaning you cite almost every day), and I
never claimed that it cannot mean those things. I was talking in
context. 

-- 
Thomas.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Erasing womens photos
    ... They don't change word definitions. ... That does not matter in the above logical conclusion, ... differnt meanings by different people, ... The US holds a plurality of the English-speaking population of the ...
    (soc.culture.jewish.moderated)
  • Re: ? re chili ingredients on MasterChef
    ... but that is the crux of the matter. ... And if someone sends an Alfredo back, having failed to ask how it's ... Some meanings wander, some stay set in ... common interpretation of "Alfredo" at all. ...
    (rec.food.cooking)
  • Re: Darwins false dichotomy fallacy.
    ... natural selection or a representation of evolutionaty theory or any of the ...  Whether it is a tautology or not doesn't matter.. ... Pragmatics deal with meaning as it is relayed through context. ... context it doesn't matter who said what. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: zero to the power zero
    ... >> Technically, Wolfram is wrong, since only limit expressions can possibly ... > I'm not sure if Mathematica supports an 'undefined'. ... If you know it is 1 in the particular context you are using it ... no matter how rare those circumstances are. ...
    (sci.math)