[plug] [OT] fear of posting

[Bret Busby]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Leon Brooks wrote:

> On Sun, 19 Sep 2004 22:01, Senectus . wrote:
> > Its kind of ironic that the one thing that brings this sometimes very
> > dormant mail list alive is a flame war over OT and spelling/grammar
> > Nazi's
> 
> s/Its/It's/ (short for "it is")
> 
> s/Nazi's/Nazis/ (they don't own anything and it's not a copntraction)
> 
> 

I disagree with you here, Leon (now, isn't that a surprise :) ).

My understanding of the use of an apostrophe, is that is is used where 
the plural of the word does not involve an "s" being directly appended 
to the word, especially when foreign languare words re converted to 
anglicised plural forms. An example, is the word maori (as in the people 
who were in New Zealand before the english, but, NOT the native people 
of New Zealand. The plural of maori, is not maoris. The word maori, is a 
maori word, not an english word, and the letter "s" does not exist in 
the maori language. Thus the word maoris is wrong.

Similarly, with the word Nazi.

The word Nazi is not an english word. It is a german term, and I believe 
that german words do not use the letter "s" suffixed to the words, to 
denote plurals. Thus also, the word Nazis, as opposed to Nazi's, is 
wrong.

Apart from that, it is my understanding, that the word Nazi, IS a 
contraction.

Nazi - repr. pronunciation of Nati in G. Nationalsozialist.
-cf The Shorter Oxford Dictionary

However, all of this has absolutely nothing to do with Linux, or with 
PLUG, or with the open source movement, and, the recent threads about 
all of this extraneous stuff, serve no purpose other than to demonstrate 
the need for list moderation on this list, which was a thing that Matt 
Kemner was reluctant to impose, when he was sole list administrator, 
but, it really has to be re-evaluated, now that this list has got 
completely out of hand.

It is unfortunate, as these irrelevant arguments are not conducive to 
keeping experienced Linux people on the list (is Christian Payne still 
around?), and are certainly not encouraging to people new to Linux, or 
to people considering moving to Linux.

These arguments only show that this is a community consumed with 
internal bickering, that cannot get its act together, leading to the 
question - "why should the public take Linux seriously, when those who 
are the local Linux community, are a bunch of self-absorbed riff-raff, 
who can't stop bickering amongst themselves?"

Sure, people have an obligation to others, to proof-read their messages 
before sending them. That applies to anyone that sends a message 
anywhere.

But, for a list such as this, to spend so much time and effort shooting 
itself in the foot, is denigrating to Linux and to the Linux community.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
  Chapter 28 of 
  "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  A Trilogy In Four Parts",
  written by Douglas Adams, 
  published by Pan Books, 1992 
....................................................