RE: [tlug] [REMINDER] "Defending the Creative Commons"

[dboudrea@example.com]

>I really enjoyed Lessig's talk last night (my first TLUG meeting), thanks to
>those who organised it. Although it was a bit too American for me, the issues
>certainly are international.

I wish I could have made it to this one....  I can't remember if it was Mr.
Lessig or not, but I think I've heard his recorded voice on an mp3 once, about a
year ago.  Did he have a tendency to over-enunciate (in a concerted effort to be
more clear, of course)?  I had a professor in college like that.

>(It did annoy me that he continually used 'architect' as a verb, he even said
>"architect the design" at one stage. But fortunately he didn't conjugate it, eg
>architected, architecting, >architection)
>
>Brett

Hey what's wrong with that, even if someone were to conjugate it?  English is a
horrible language to begin with, but there are many words in traditional,
standard usage that are used interchangably as both nouns and verbs, depending
on the context.  Even though English is complex, it's also flexible in this way
and that only helps us express ourselves better.  When you're talking about
software, and creating software, all you have to work with are ones and zeros so
the processes we have at our disposal are very abstract.  Imagine how this will
evolve and change some day.  Making a metaphor to architecture is appropriate, I
think, because it distinguishes one act from the act of just slapping code
("bricks") together without any focus or direction on what's actually being
built.

English has so many silly rules.

Winston Churchill spoke about another stupid rule like this, about the rule that
says you can't end a sentence with a preposition, and he replied something like
"That is the kind of English up with which I will not put."  I don't know if the
queen was within earshot or not when he said it, but this American would have
supported him.

Many editors can check your code for matching quotes easily enough.  Mismatched
quotes are the result of a typo, a mere syntax error.  However, in pure English
language text (as opposed to say, a C or perl function dealing with strings),
finding the proper quoting of some English text spread over a few paragraphs
would be significantly more complicated.  Why does this have to be?  Especially
when quotations jump from one paragraph to the next, such as, "this ends the
paragraph...

"...and this begins another."  Now there are three quotations.  That doesn't
seem right, does it?  Well, that's English for you.

I ask you, is the speaker for English, or is English for the speaker?

David Boudreau