Re: Proposal to add dateExpires to JobPosting

On 26 Oct 2012, at 16:21, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:

> On 26 October 2012 07:57, Nicholas Shanks <nickshanks@nickshanks.com> wrote:
>> "validThrough" is a horrible name, it grammatically grates on the ear
>> and sounds much too american for professional use. Please consider a
>> phrase such as validUntil instead.
> 
> Can we avoid ethnic/nationalistic slurs on this mailing list please. I
> have it on good authority that many Americans are quite professional
> these days.

Hi Dan, thanks for taking the bait.
It's true, my knee-jerk reaction was gurgh! That's an Americanismh and form my fingers into a cross to ward off it's inherent evil, but if I had just written my raw emotions, no-one would have paid any attention to me. As Ian Hickson often alludes to, the plight of the front-line coder is often under-represented when standards are being drawn up, as they do not get representation, or if represented, their voice is frequently drowned out. In order to make our voice heard, as individuals, we have to tweak to noses of those in power, or in larger numbers we can take up our metaphorical pitch forks and march on the capital.

The sub-context of my message was that dialectal phrases, be they Scots, Scouser, Geordie or as I believe is true in this case, from the Mid- and Western US, are inappropriate for use in an English-based vocabulary which is to be used by thousands of speakers of other dialects, and learnt by hundreds of thousands of non-native speakers. I feel that those in positions of responsibility should not be teaching them ebad Englishf (i.e. English which is not universal to all speakers). I doubt you would have replied if I had used a non-specific term such as etoo regionalf or etoo dialectalf?

At least it wasn't spelt ethruf :)

\ Nicholas.

Received on Wednesday, 31 October 2012 08:25:31 UTC