[systemd-devel] [PATCH] Reword sentences that contain psuedo-English "resp."

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Lennart Poettering at 15/10/12 16:59 did gyre and gimble:
> On Mon, 15.10.12 09:41, Andrew Eikum (aeikum at codeweavers.com) wrote:
> 
> Heya,
> 
>>
>> As you likely know, Arch Linux is in the process of moving to systemd.
>> So I was reading through the various systemd docs and quickly became
>> baffled by this new abbreviation "resp.", which I've never seen before
>> in my English-mother-tongue life.
>>
>> Some quick Googling turned up a reference:
>> <http://www.transblawg.eu/index.php?/archives/870-Resp.-and-other-non-existent-English-wordsNicht-existente-englische-Woerter.html>
>>
>> I guess it's a literal translation of the German "beziehungsweise", but
>> English doesn't work the same way. The word "respectively" is used
>> exclusively to provide an ordering connection between two lists. E.g.
>> "the prefixes k, M, and G refer to kilo-, mega-, and giga-,
>> respectively." It is also never abbreviated to "resp." So the sentence
>> "Sets the default output resp. error output for all services and
>> sockets" makes no sense to a natural English speaker.
>>
>> This patch removes all instances of "resp." in the man pages and
>> replaces them with sentences which are much more clear and, hopefully,
>> grammatically valid. In almost all instances, it was simply replacing
>> "resp." with "or," which the original author could probably just do in
>> the future to avoid this problem.
>>
>> The only other instances of "resp." are in the src/ subtree, which I
>> don't feel privileged to correct.
>>                                  <term><option>--until=</option></term>
>>  
>>                                  <listitem><para>Start showing entries
>> -                                newer or of the specified date,
>> -                                resp. older or of the specified
>> +                                newer than the specified date,
>> +                                or older than the specified
> 
> Hmmm, as I understood the text you linked this usage is actually
> correct, as "resp." means "each separately in the order mentioned",
> which is precisely what is meant here. The diff doesn't show it, but
> this section is about both --since= and --until, hence we explain the
> meaning of --since= first, and then of --until=, and link this with
> "resp.". 

I think using resp. is fine, but the wording above was still "weird"
(tho' I'm looking at it out of context, so feel free to ignore me!)

I think:

Start showing entries newer or of the specified date resp. older or of
the specified..

would IMO be better written as:

Start showing entries occurring on or after (resp. before) the specified
date.



> So, now I am really confused, what's really right and wrong here? ;-)
> 
>>                                  <literal>tomorrow</literal> are
>>                                  understood, which refer to 00:00:00 of
>>                                  the day before the current day, the
>> -                                current day, resp the day after the
>> +                                current day, or the day after the
> 
> same here: we first list the possible strings, and then their meanings,
> in the same order.

Perhaps parenthesis could clarify some of the resp. usage here too?


>>                  <para>The four calls return the number of entries
>>                  advanced/set back on success or a negative errno-style
>> -                error code. When the end (resp. beginning) of the journal
>> +                error code. When the end (or beginning) of the
>>                  journal
> 
> This appears to be correct usage of "resp", again as this describes
> sd_journal_next, as well as sd_journal_resp.

Yes and I think resp. is better than an or here as it clearly defines
the differences between the two options outlined, rather than just a
"normal" 'or' that is in the sentence structure generally.

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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