Ping: [PATCH] netlink.7, tcp.7: tfix: s/acknowledgment/acknowledgement

["Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)" <alx.manpages@gmail.com>]

Hi Michael,

Ping!

And now I noticed, while searching for this email:
Debian uses "acknowledgement" too :p

[
From: "Debian Bug Tracking System" <owner@bugs.debian.org>
To: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>
Subject: Bug#978945: Acknowledgement (thunderbird: Message subwindow tilts
 (resizes in a loop))
]

Kind regards,

Alex

On 1/8/21 2:34 PM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
> On 1/8/21 2:23 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
>> Hello Alex,
>>
>> On 1/8/21 12:36 PM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
>>>
>>> On 1/8/21 11:29 AM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
>>>> Hi Alex,
>>>>
>>>> On 1/7/21 5:55 PM, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>>>>> Signed-off-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>
>>>>
>>>> Take a look at
>>>>
>>>> https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=acknowledgment%2Cacknowledgement&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=5&smoothing=3
>>>>
>>>> and compare American English vs British English using the drop-down.
>>>>
>>>> When I inherited man-pages in 2004, it was a hodge-podge mix of 
>>>> American vs British spelling. My native spelling is the latter,
>>>> but I value consistency and felt that things needed to be
>>>> standardized on one or other, and in computing, American is the
>>>> norm so that is what I settled on.hodge-podge
>>>>
>>>> I'm largely at piece with American spelling these days (it 
>>>> is the spelling I use in most of my writing), but I guess
>>>> the one point that still bothers me are the American spellings
>>>> "acknowledgment" and "judgment". They just feel wrong.
>>>
>>> Yup
>>>
>>>>
>>>> However, I now learned from the Ngrams that even in British
>>>> English, the spelling without "e" was historically the norm.
>>>> So it seems that it is British English that has changed, 
>>>> not American English!
>>>>
>>>> I was about to say that I must decline this patch. And then
>>>> I thought I'd take a look at the POSIX standard. It seems
>>>> to largely follow American spelling (e.g., "color", "canceled",
>>>> "recognize", "analog").[1] But, it uses "acknowledgement"!
>>>> (There are even a couple of instances of "judgement" in 
>>>> the standard.) It seems like others like to have the
>>>> extra "e' in those words...
>>>>
>>>> So, I'm not sure what to do with this patch. 
>>>
>>> Hey Michael,
>>>
>>> D'oh, I thought it was a typo! :-)
>>>
>>> American English surprises me.
>>>
>>> Yes I prefer American English, but I've also learn_ed_ British at
>>> school, (and learnt American through the internet), so I have a weird
>>> hodge-podge in my head too :p
>>>
>>> I guess many people though it was a typo from the data you put.  Also see:
>>>
>>> $ grep -r acknowledgement \
>>>   |wc -l;
>>> grep: man7/.hostname.7.swp: binary file matches
>>> 69
>>> $ grep -r acknowledgment \
>>>   |wc -l;
>>> 23
>>
>> Okay -- this gets weirder and weirder. Look more closely
>> at what the grep found. Those instances of 'acknowledgement'
>> are almost all in the page comments containing BSD licenses!
>>
>> I thought to myself, that's strange: because BSD is from 
>> California... Maybe some enthusiastic person did a
>> global edit in the distant past to change this to British
>> spelling in the Linux manual pages. But, it doesn't seem that
>> way. I grepped a few thousand header files that I've assembled
>> over the years from various OSes, and in the BSD licenses,
>> the vast majority use 'acknowledgement'. A few use
>> 'acknowledgment', but I suspect that those were changed
>> after importing from other places.
>>
>> It seems that the underground spelling resistance was strong
>> at Berkeley.
>>
>>> Nevertheless, I prefer American too, so I'd invert the patch.
>>> What about s/acknowledgement/acknowledgment/?
>> So, I still don't know what to do. I never much liked
>> the "American" "*dgment", but:
>>
>> (1) That seems to have been the historical form that 
>>     British English moved away from.
>>
>> (2) A couple of "American" groups (BSD, POSIX) use
>>     the "British" spelling.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Michael
>>
>> PS I want to join the spelling resistance :-)
> 
> Hello Michael,
> 
> That made me think about it again, and well, a language isn't what books
> say, but what people actually use.  That's something I learnt from the
> Catalan language, which some institutions constantly try to normalize
> differently than common usage, and it's weird, very very weird.
> 
> So, if most people use *dgement, I'd say the word is correctly spelled
> *dgement.
> 
> But we need a common spelling, because I was searching in vim for the
> word, and it was very weird because I knew the word was there, but it
> didn't show it to me.  I had to manually move to the line to see that it
> was written differently, on the same page! :/
> 
> So I hereby insist on my initial patch :-}
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Alex
> 
> 


-- 
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/