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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

#181

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

hydrok9 wrote: post #92
crazygringo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ireland uses 24h clock in writing (including casual writing, text messages, etc.), and it wouldn't be at all unusual for personal digital clocks to be set to 24h clock, but I'd be surprised to hear it in speech.

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

#182

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

NeoTar wrote: post #52
jon-wood wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the UK and still couldn’t tell you this off the top of my head. Most people can’t - when setting up systems with a cutoff date/time I’ve regularly been asked to have them expire at 11:59pm, because it avoids any ambiguity here.

I think that's generally a sensible idea. Anything which required a schedule for humans to read - theatre performances, trains, planes, etc - are better off being scheduled for 23:55, 23:59, 00:01 or 00:05 than exactly at midnight because lots of people don't understand or get confused whether 00:00 on a date means the start or the end of the day. I do enjoy though where systems have to deal with 'weird' days. I beli…

The Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable uses 00:00 for a train departing at midnight, and 24:00 for a train arriving at midnight.

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

#183

Post by esafak »

cratermoon wrote: post #127
esafak wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Names are not strings. So what are they?

Strings are a primitive type. Names are not strings in the same way Dates are not strings. They can be implemented, represented, and printed as strings, but they have behaviors and meaning that the primitive string type does not. To use another example, a binary tree is not an array, although it can be implemented using an array. Money is not a floating point value, and woe to the programmer that tries to use float f…

Without making assumptions about the origin of the name, you can't impute any structure onto that string, can you? In that case, it is still simply a string.

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

#184

Post by jamiek88 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #18
phpnode wrote: post #15

It is upsetting to hear the phrase “turn of the century” used to describe the year 2000. I know it’s correct, but it still feels very wrong.

Almost as wrong to me as the friendly jab I got from a teenager last week about “being born in the 1900s.”

Oooh! Nice burn, kid!

It still makes me do mental arithmetic when someone gives post 2000 as a birthdate. Shit, my nephew was born post 2010 and he’s twelve which is weird because 2010 was like, three years ago.

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

#185

Post by specialist »

wayfinder wrote: post #104
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Nah I agree with OP The problem isn’t the deep history of discrimination. I consider that something that created a lot of growth. The problem is discrimination is natural and it is only fought with diversity but there is no such place that is truly diverse. I live in, by world standards, a diverse part of the LA metro area. Except there’s like no Black people. Now if I go to a more Black-dominated part of LA, there m…

You're talking about something different than u/MSFT_Edging.

> The issue is that I cannot speak for Nigerians or Kazakhstanis however hard I try.

Yup. You demonstrate an awareness, a conscientiousness, that's too rare.

I've been in gatherings (eg board meetings) where someone will presume to speak on behalf of others. While one of those others is sitting right there, trying to be heard.

Not helpful.

And super awkward.

Which reminds me... That All Gas No Breaks guy did a terrific segment about those "antifa" & "BLM" protests in Portland Oregon. Standard in person interviews with a bunch of bored white kids just looking for a fight.

Then the genius bit: No Breaks sought out blacks and asked them about the protests. He just let's them talk, in that great way that he does.

Punchline: the blacks interviewed stated the belligerents a) were missing the point (to listen to black people) and b) were making it that much harder for blacks to be heard.

Typical.

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

#186

Post by aitchnyu »

In English letter writing lessons here in India, our teachers said date, place and signature were supposed to be right aligned but completely left aligned text is catching on due to computers. I'm 1989 born, but we were using DOS programs even as a teen.

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

#188

Post by Shadowmist »

cratermoon wrote: post #174
mcpackieh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are international standards for representing dates, but none exist for names. Names do not abide by any scheme or set of rules, therefore the only appropriate data structure for storing names is a unicode string. Anything else will exclude people.

Point me to the international standards for representing money.

ISO 4217

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

#189

Post by GABG »

briandear wrote: post #89
GABG wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My name contains a letter not in ascii, breaking lots of systems Tell me about it. In my native language (European) we have accents at the end of some words (like città or pubblicità ; city and advertisement respectively). As someone that works with typography in someway or another, I can't count how many times I had a font that didn't support the character à or é or whatever and I had to choose a font that looks s…

> because there no É button on the keyboard On a Mac it’s easy. Just hold down the letter and you will have options for pretty much any accent. Holding Capital E for example on iOS: Ë É E È Ê Ě Ę etc..

But most of the people that make this error are non-tachsavy Windows users. And while there is Microsoft's PowerToys[0] with the Quick Accent tool that does the same thing, I doubt many people know about it.

> on iOS

I think this works for any mobile keyboard (for example, AOSP's default keyboard supports that). In my language at least, the use of a capital letter with an accent is pretty rare, especially when we're talking about quick messages (which is what your most likely to write on mobile)

[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/powertoys

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

#190

Post by satvikpendem »

kqr wrote: post #103
karaterobot wrote: post #47

Pretty thin soup here. Basically, the argument comes down to grammar and spelling suggestions, and then a couple of other features like document templates. I would need stronger evidence to believe that Word's grammar suggestions have empirically affected the language people use—outside Word itself, possibly. It would be much more tenable to say that Word influences how people write Word documents, but they seem to b…

As far as myself go, predictive typing systems have a definitive effect on how I write (qualitatively and stylometrically), and this is the reason I avoid them. I want to use the words in my head, not the ones in the machine. At least until recently it's not been up to par.

I use SwiftKey, it is the best one I've found as it will remember the sequence of words previously used, which are common things I often say, so their predictive text is often much better than Google's for example.
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