[plug] [OT] fear of posting

[Leon Brooks]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 13:59, Bret Busby wrote:
> The plural of maori, is not maoris.

As I understand the language, it's "maori". As in a sheep many sheep, or 
English (you don't say Englishes or antyhing).

> 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.

Some of them do. There's actually an amazing number of ways to pluralise 
German words - an "s" suffix being among them - plus at least one way 
for Germans to pluralise foreign words. But I'll settle for Nazier or 
Nazien. (-:

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

If so, Nazism should be written Nazi'ism, and isn't. Does German use an 
apostrophe of contraction?

The other thing is that it's actually an English word by adoption now, 
as well as being a German word in its own right, and is listed this way 
in several dictionaries.

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

Yes, American Heritage says "German, short for Nationalsozialistische 
deutsche Arbeiter-Partei, National Socialist German Workers' Party." I 
don't believe that it's relevant (or, hah, germane).

> 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.

Ah! Suddenly an underlying reason for your linguistic pedantry size 
competition springs to our collective attention.

I vote "no" to moderation. (-:

> 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?"

If it's really so bad, why are you here? If I were to bet that it's 
because the thrill of combat (in the form of "bickering") has become 
addictive, how far off would I be?

Has it ever struck you (and any others onlooking) that "bickering" and 
personality clashes like this, WHICH PEOPLE WORK THROUGH, are one of 
the reasons that FOSS is so robust, and rapid of development?

When I have to break up an argument amongst my own children (5yob and 
3.5yog) and possibly their cousins, the hardest part is getting them to 
let go of an idea. Two tactics they use right from the cradle to keep 
an idea alive are "everybody else is doing it" and "what's this for?"

Keeping a grammarnazifest alive and on serious terms when it had safely 
degenerated into light-heartedness fits into both of those categories. 
I think the point had already been well made when at least two others 
picked up errors that I'd missed.

I think PLUG could do with some changing, but moderating the main list 
is not among that list of changes, nor is it ever likely to come under 
serious consideration. If a poster becomes a problem, he'll be kicked 
off, and that seems to have worked so far.

Now that we've so heavily promoted the existence of PLUG's off-topic 
list, can we take this conversation there?

    http://plug.linux.org.au/resources/mailing-list#offtopic

Cheers; Leon