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Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

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Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#91

Post by tomrod »

tgaj wrote: post #72
tomrod wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AM: morning, PM: afternoon/evening

Yeah, but this is the problem - why noon is "afternoon"?

Clopen intervals in order to have a well-specified time system.

[0] [12:00 PM, 12:00 AM) for after the noon instant

[1] [12:00 AM, 12:00 PM) for before the noon instant

24-hour time is superior to the mod-12 time system in almost every way but mechanical clock faces and soldier shifts under early systems that used sun dials. However, the equivalent question can be asked by a day is a clopen interval of [00:00 current day, 00:00 next day)

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#92

Post by hydrok9 »

crazygringo wrote: post #81
yakubin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People in 24h cultures always use 12 analog hours in normal situations No, we don't. The only person I know who by default uses 12h is my grandmother. Everybody else always uses 24h.

Do you mind me asking where you are? All my experience has also been using 12h time in casual situations in 24h countries. I'm curious of a country that doesn't, and whether that's true of the whole region.

Ireland, New Zealand and Finland used 24 casually when I was there

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#93

Post by MSFT_Edging »

sshine wrote: post #31
didntcheck wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one that always gets me is how Google's image captcha assumes everyone knows what American school buses, fire hydrants, crosswalks, and various other street features look like. As a youngish EU citizen I do know those from cartoons and the internet, but I doubt my parents do > Or how things are moderated to an US standard It's just comical how adults on Youtube talking about adult topics are pressured into censor…

It’s similarly comical how video-recorded board meetings will have grown-up people hold woke signs while others recite from library books with controversial wording, everyone starts shouting, and they get escorted off property for reading aloud the book (available to kids). It feels like the US is overstretching its own diversity. Maybe it’s just as bad some places in Europe, and it just doesn’t get televised.

> It feels like the US is overstretching its own diversity.

Something about this line is bothering me.

In the US, we're very diverse sure, but also that diversity comes with deep history of violence, struggle, systemic oppression, etc.

To many, current movements might come off like they're overstepping, but so much about our culture is so deeply steeped in the opposite. So much of our daily life has been structured around old deeply racist systems and as a population we're struggling to come to terms with the contradictions of concepts we were taught with the reality. We're taught we're a melting pot of cultures, yet there are so many atrocities in living memory that parts of the population wish would be simply forgotten.

So there is the counter swing of the "woke"(I hate that word and the complete corruption of the concept), which is an attempt to bring these subconscious ideas into the conscious level so we can think about them and confront them, rather than let them continue to simmer.

The overarching goal isn't to make all these things the standard, but to overshoot so that when the cultural tendon relaxes, it falls to a better place.

The "Woke" movements is an attempt to fight a cultural virus, and the remnants of the virus does not like it and gets defensive, and informs other parts of the body that this medicine is actually a virus in of itself. The goal isn't that the medicine becomes a permanent fixture, but that it brings to light the virus and allows the society to understand how to extinguish it.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#94

Post by Skeime »

cubefox wrote: post #24

I remember that Word's German spell checker started quite early to only accept the spelling "E-Mail" as correct. This was at a time when emails were fairly new, and spellings like "eMail" were also common. (Though not "email", as nouns are capitalized in German.) I'm pretty confident that Word played a significant role in "E-Mail" becoming the canonically accepted German spelling.

It also happens to be aligned with how other similar words are written (S-Bahn, U-Boot, …), so I think it was likely to become that anyway.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#95

Post by carlosjobim »

yakubin wrote: post #50
carlosjobim wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in 24h cultures always use 12 analog hours in normal situations, but the 24h system is needed for situations where it is easy to make a mistake. When is dinner? - It's at seven. When does the flight depart? - At 19:00

> People in 24h cultures always use 12 analog hours in normal situations No, we don't. The only person I know who by default uses 12h is my grandmother. Everybody else always uses 24h.

I've never heard anybody from a 24h country use 24h unless it's regarding situations where there cannot be any ambiguity. You either live in an exceptional place, or interact with exceptional people. World you really say "At fifteen o'clock" instead of "At three o'clock" or "Three in the afternoon"?

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#96

Post by saurik »

smt88 wrote: post #65
mailund wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my god, as a Scandinavian, the whole American thing about boobs is so annoying! It seems like the internet really want to force me to be shocked about seeing a chest, it's so weird. Most of the time, it is completely outside of a sexual context, but videos get 18+ because you apparently take psychological damage of you see a pair of tits before you're allowed to vote. Actually didn't know about the quote thing tho…

On the other hand, there are literally billions of people in African, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures for whom photos of bare boobs are also taboo, so this seems like a case of just having to deal with being a minority in a public square.

Are you asserting that those billions of people who also aren't getting their way (as all decisions are made by Americans, whom are not at all numerous either offline or online) are a minority?

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#97

Post by cubefox »

crazygringo wrote: post #73
cubefox wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those points also apply to other European countries. Though regarding the quotation marks, that seems to be more the fault of the local keyboard layouts. I don't understand why German keyboards don't have the keys to write „ord“. MS Word relies on a software solution to automatically convert "ord" into the German format, but most software (like browsers) understandably don't bother with implementing such rep…

> why German keyboards don't have the keys to write „ord“ I'm assuming for the same reason American/English keyboards don't have the keys to write “place”, just "place". Which is because American/English typewriters didn't -- they invented straight quotes to save extra keys. And looking up on Google Images, it looks like German typewriters were the same -- Shift+2 was a straight double quote. It's my personal opinion…

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm a little too young to have experience with typewriters. I assume most European typewriter layouts were even more spatially constrained than the US one (due to the presence of special characters not found in the standard Latin Alphabet), so there wasn't much room to allow two quotation marks. And the fixed-width typewriter "font" didn't look properly typographic anyway.

If the straight quote hadn't been invented, the influence in programming languages would have been interesting. Then presumably there would be no common quotation mark present on all keyboards. So perhaps programming languages would have used various kinds of brackets only. Straight quotes aren't great anyway for most things, as they can't really be nested unambiguously.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#98

Post by AtlasBarfed »

stg22 wrote: post #59
didntcheck wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one that always gets me is how Google's image captcha assumes everyone knows what American school buses, fire hydrants, crosswalks, and various other street features look like. As a youngish EU citizen I do know those from cartoons and the internet, but I doubt my parents do > Or how things are moderated to an US standard It's just comical how adults on Youtube talking about adult topics are pressured into censor…

Depending on the political situation in your country, your parents probably got the same knowledge of American life from TV series and films. America's monopoly of popular culture is weaker today than it was when they were growing up.

Speaking of monopolies, the article is "celebrating" 40 years of brazen anticompetitive behavior and monopoly that inflicting billions and possibly trillions of dollars of economic damage on the world.

And of course a long slide from any sort of meaningful enforcement on monopolies and cartels, once in the American market, and now largely in the international sphere.

Finally, Microsoft Office itself is an information prison. The information is locked in proprietary and defensively changed file formats that either require more Microsoft "products" to access the information meaningfully, or decades of reverse engineering.

And keep in mind that 90% of the data in office documents is just ... text.

Anyway, Happy Microsoft Word day apparently.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#99

Post by cubefox »

Skeime wrote: post #94
cubefox wrote: post #24

I remember that Word's German spell checker started quite early to only accept the spelling "E-Mail" as correct. This was at a time when emails were fairly new, and spellings like "eMail" were also common. (Though not "email", as nouns are capitalized in German.) I'm pretty confident that Word played a significant role in "E-Mail" becoming the canonically accepted German spelling.

It also happens to be aligned with how other similar words are written (S-Bahn, U-Boot, …), so I think it was likely to become that anyway.

Yeah, orthographically it was the most sensible choice.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#100

Post by sandworm101 »

matsemann wrote: post #5

I'm a but wary in general about how US tech used around the world slowly erodes the nuances of different cultures. Often the software doesn't take into account how things work in other languages, different regions etc. I'm also not sure I'd blame the engineers in SV too much, of course they design software based on their own context. But with tech becoming global, it's a bit sad how it's not prioritized more. Example…

>> Often the software doesn't take into account how things work in other languages

Not just languages. In my area we run into constant issues with MS products using American date/time formats in places it isn't wanted. For half of ever month this is a big deal, even inside the US as many organizations use the international standard. People cut-and-paste from popup windows or error logs only to discover that the tiny bit of MS code that generated the notice doesn't respect realworld date formats (day-month-year) and just defaults to the US format (month-day-year). Non-MS software (apple/google) and open source more often than not respect date formats. It is MS that seems to just not care.

I was once involved in a heated debate re a contract when everyone suddenly realized the issue: 05/06/18 had been confused with 06/05/18, resulting in an extra month of costs being attached. I think to avoid further ambiguity I jokingly rewrote it as "On the sixth day of the fifth month of the year of our lord two thousands and eighteen and ..."

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