> However, from this does not follow that one individual or a majority > are allowed to dispense of any rules and do as they please while > claiming that they are speaking English.
Sure it does. Chaucer, Joyce, Shakespeare. We even have special grammatical terms for when the author decided to say "to hell with it". English is a strict subject-verb-object (SVO) language: screw that up and you sound like Yoda... or Shakespeare. "Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end." (_Richard III_) Inverting word order is called hyperbaton. Sentence fragments are bad, right? Meet anapodoton. Repetition is bad. Well, except if you're Churchill, in which case epizeuxis is your friend. "Never give in -- never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." English is chock full of special rules that tells speakers how we ought break the rules. It's beautiful. :) > Instead, one must apply the well-known rules of English and use > common sense in determining which words one will regard as > legitimate. Leaving this judgment to majority amounts to the ad > populum fallacy and to such blatant absurdities as regarding the > words “u”, “gotta” and “wanna” as valid synonyms of “you”, “got to” > and “want to”. Perfectly valid depending on the community and the dialect. When I go visit my Southern relatives I don't talk about dragonflies, I talk about snake doctors. I don't say "the sun went down," I say "the sun's gone done." It's called code-switching, the ability to shift between different dialects, vocabularies, and grammatical rules. I get that you're a linguistic prescriptivist. But English -- especially American English -- isn't. > In the case of the word “Linux”, my argument is that this word was > introduced (at least in informatics) for a specific use: To refer to > a kernel. Sure. And "cheater" was originally introduced to refer to an employee of the Crown charged with administering real estate. But that's not what it means any more, and that's not what Linux means any more, either. > Thus it is not necessity, but plain sloppiness what explains it use > as something else. Sure. English is a sloppy language; that's what makes it so awesome. Embrace the mutability. Set yourself free. :) > In short: Your argument "_many_ people use “Linux” to refer to any > Linux-based operating system, therefore it is correct English” is a > big mistake. I continue to be amused by your tendency to think the English language has to respect the fragility of your linguistic beliefs. :) _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users