Microsoft forbids class actions in new Windows licence

@The Indomitable Gall - - Re: @Graham Wilson

Hardliner, surely not? If my English teacher read your comments she'd laugh in amazement then probably throw a copy of Fowler's 'The King's English' at you. I'm in engineering, and as a group we're often known for our inability to be able to string two words together. Having been to university, you'd have a damn good idea about what arts faculties think of engineers.

I don't know when you were educated but most of my schooling was in the 1960s. Standards have changed so dramatically since then it'd be no exaggeration whatsoever to say that my teachers would be horrified if they read the posts and editorials in El Reg pages. Back then; grammar was a serious business from which no one could escape.

What matters is being understood and understanding what other people have written. Today this is a problem but it was much less so back then. In short, that's comprehension and it used to be a large part of the English curriculum. In a few generations, things have gotten so bad that it's a regular occurrence in my profession to find that we can no longer make sense of manufacturer's engineering manuals and often we have to rewrite them before they're put into service. What makes it so bad is that both writer and reader suffer the same English comprehension problems. The matter is so serious that we'd be liable under occupational and health and safety if the manuals weren't rewritten in a clear, understandable and succinct form. It's not that manuals contain excessive jargon, rather the language and sentence structure used simply doesn't make sense. I should add these manuals aren't from Asia and in Ginglish but are written in English and are sourced from English-speaking countries. Similarly, I find myself regularly correcting reports others have written, and I'm forever correcting misused apostrophes that randomly appear almost anywhere in formal correspondence written by secretarial staff--they're supposed to be correcting my grammar, not vice versa! 30 years ago, this role reversal would have been unthinkable.

It may be of surprise but I am somewhat familiar with French contractions. I've French relatives and I recall that once in Arles I found myself dealing with a hotel receptionist only to find that his contractions combined with the local vernacular brought the conversation to a halt. It was at this point he reached under the counter, produced two English-French dictionaries and handed one to me. We then burst out laughing. The French may have codified the contracted forms but as I've discovered that doesn't help in many parts of the country. Then again, France has the Académie française to formalise its language but as we know, such regulation would never work in English. Nevertheless, perhaps having no academy in English is part of our problem.

Re 'tsunami', having worked in Japan for a while, and here in Australia where I reside, I'm often in contact with Japanese people but that doesn't make me expert in Japanese. Anyway, as you've asked, here's my take on it. The constant 'ts' is pronounced similarly as in 'cats' except it's at the beginning of the word unlike in English where it's only used at the end. 'tso' (with short vowel) may be a better pronunciation of 'ts' when used alone. The Japanese consonant 'tsu' (the small hiragana 'っ' or katakana 'ッ' sokuon symbol) is just one mora and the word 'tsunami' is both regular and short (almost abrupt). With only one mora in its name, the Japanese town of Tsu (loosely meaning port) claims the shortest sounding name in the world.

However, all that is away from what I was driving at, which is that English has appropriated 'tsunami' for no other reason other than it's fashionable then screwed up its pronunciation in the process as the word requires a modicum of effort to say properly in English. Moreover, doing so it's killed off the perfectly good English term 'tidal wave'. Furthermore, there's no process in English to correct bad or stupid usage. I used this example not because I wanted to take on the role of a grammar cop but because written English in many areas is getting so bad that entropy has set--people can no longer understand what's been written. The apostrophe just serves as a trivial example; do away with it and entropy is increased, information is lost as there'll be instances when the possessive becomes ambiguous.

In spite of all its logical inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies, one keeps the apostrophe in English because there's nothing better. Grammarians like yourself might hate its grammatical inconsistencies but hundreds of years of convention (wherein editors and master printers have formalised its use) have led to a consensus, a result that was useful enough for everyone to use and easy enough for schoolkids to learn if taught the simple rules.

You say "the whole 's/s' thing is another pointless mess" and I'd be one of the first to agree with you. However, you grammarians have done nothing to rectify the problem except completely pull the fragile edifice down, now we've nothing but a 'guaranteed' mess. A glance at Fowler from the viewpoint of formal logic and it looks like a mess (at least it does to me), but nevertheless those rules worked, English written within the bounds of these rules was comprehensible and often a pleasure to read. Now it seems everybody's given up.

In the bookshelf directly within reach of me is my copy of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002 ed)--all 1800+ pages of the damn thing. How the average human being is supposed to get his or her head around its contents is beyond me. This huge edifice is clearly a remarkable and scholarly insight into the workings of the English language but it's contents have not distilled out or trickled down into the schools or infused into the curriculum thus resulting in students having better English skills than those of 50 years earlier. To the contrary, there's widespread and irrefutable evidence that English as is taught today is leaving people much less skilled in the language. For years now, both universities and industry have been crying out over the fact, some universities have even offered remedial English courses to new entrants to compensate for the failure of the education system.

"It's you sort that convinces people that grammar is valueless, so why not leave the matter to people who actually understand the matter?"

So how do my sort convince people that grammar is valueless? I've never said that, and from what I've written here and elsewhere, it ought to be very clear that my view is quite the contrary. I've never sought the limelight in this debate and it's a tragedy that I've found it necessary for me to have to speak out. Literacy has fallen to such a low level that I'm feeling the repercussions directly in technical and engineering work. When technical and scientific industries start speaking out about the language and increasing illiteracy then clearly something's very wrong.

With respect, the literacy establishment's let the ball drop and we techies have only picked it up with great reluctance, it's been an act of desperation on our part. You grammarians--custodians of the English language--have a lot to answer. For the last half-century or so, you've let established rules slip but failed to replace them with equal or better ones. The consequential effects have been that over several generations, many students have graduated whilst still teetering on the border of illiteracy. The consequential effects on our society have been enormous.

We disagree but thank you for an enlightened discussion.