I agree! More confusing than Polish, German, French, Spanish and ancient Greek, which are my other languages. Though no articles in Polish is still brainboggling to me.
1 Like
I was under the impression we were talking about mistakes in commercial products in order to improve them, not about obnoxiously correcting peopleās mistakes in everyday life conversations, just because.
There is a purpose, actuallyā¦ a good one, even: helping them improve and teaching them something they didnāt know. I personally donāt correct peopleās mistakes like that in my everyday life (just like I havenāt corrected anyoneās mistakes in this thread or any other) unless I know the person and know they will welcome the opportunity to learn which is something I welcome as well, when given the chance. Thereās a huge difference between pointing out someoneās mistakes in a conversation and being annoyed at finding them in a book youāve bought, though.
If weāre sharing personal experiences, hereās one of mine: a few years ago, I had a colleague who kept confusing the words āappraiseā and āappriseā until a client corrected her. She asked me about it for confirmation and I told her that yes, she did tend to confuse the two. She got mad at me for saying nothing when she misused the words even though I knew better, thus wittingly letting her make a fool of herself in front of other people. (edit: her words, not mine)
Thatās a pretty good theory.
Personally, I like to think of language as a game. Like any other game, it has a goal (communication/conveying oneās thoughts) and rules (definitions, grammar, spelling, syntax, punctuation etc.).
Anyone is welcome to come up with new rules or variants as long as all the players involved are aware of the modifications and accept them. Otherwise the game becomes extremely frustating for your opponents and chances are theyāll be less inclined to want to play with you (imagine playing Cups, the card game Chandler came up with in F.R.I.E.N.D.S).
Thatās not to say youāre not allowed to play if you donāt know the rules by heart and are prone to make mistakes but when you do make one, itās good to learn from it and try not to repeat it.
If you want to play with someone and canāt agree on new, better rules, itās safer to follow the rule book.
10 Likes
And shaming is what it is. There are two ways to correct the caring one and The asshole one. The asshole one is the one. You are Scolding as publicly possible for a person that is trying to pretend help you while look at you with prepotency and disdain for poor stranger or insert racist slur.
I have not noticed yet anyone that publicly nitpick other grammar to help me. Another thing is when I ask for it in a thread.
The only asshole correction achieves at least in my case Is causing me a deep depression and totally stop trying to learning English by myself.
Because why I should try to if I am so bad at it or everything that is not absolutely Oxford University Press dictionary is shit. I wonāt achieve that level in a million years.
Now I am deeply depressed and in the fence of erasing my more 100,000 words in the last half-year. As the only value of content is a grammar that is not even standard and universal, to begin with.
Sorry, for the rant now I will go away to cry in a corner.
When using adjectives like āblond/eā on people, the spelling changes depending on the personal gender identity of the person you are referring to. Thus, in the case of adjectives about individual people, gendered language in French, Spanish, etc. do function the same way English gendered language does. This also doesnāt address the point of how to handle this situation with non-binary individuals.
Itās also worth noting that being pedantic about the spelling of blonde and blond in a language where gendered language is typically used to refer to identified gender, having the author choose which spelling to refer to a non-binary person with is going to come across as (mis)gendering. Having a singular spelling used throughout a work solves this issue.
8 Likes
I understand the emotion behind the request might have come off differently; I am not shaming anyone, the main emotion behind this was a plead.
The nature of a peeve is that an innocuos action, in my case what I perceived to be incorrect grammar, causes pain. And thus I plead for that pain to stop while providing a solution.
Even if you Did make a completely grammatically wrong mistake, thatās nothing to be ashamed of. Every person starts somewhere, and everyone grows and changes. Like I have in the course of the discussion of this thread; I learned that blonde/blond distinction is blurring in todayās English language.
Please donāt give up learning English ā English isnāt my first language either, and I had to work hard (am still working hard) to achieve the level of fluency I have now. Itās never worth giving up something you like.
4 Likes
Also it may help to note that most of the peeve was triggered by gender dysphoria, which I have due to ā tragically unfortunately ā being transgender, and being referred to as āBlondeā when I was under the impression that it was a word for females was painful.
2 Likes
Or we could keep those two and add a new, third one for non-binary peopleā¦ There are many solutions to most problems.
1 Like
Discussions like this are promoted here because they should help all of us understand the fact that English is a living language that is changing and evolving ā sometimes so fast that it seems we blink and something is new.
I donāt want anyone here to feel discouraged or putt off by what is said here - as long as we are respectful and aware of each other as individuals, this should not happen.
I can understand the source of your pain ā hopefully, you will now use your knowledge to alleviate this pain.
Growing up, my peers would use the word āblondeā as a way to attack me ā anytime I did something stupid or wrong or if I broke the unwritten social rules growing up, I was labelled āblondeā ā¦ even my sisters would tease me such at times.
At all other times, I was āblondā ā¦ it wasnāt until advanced English courses in high school that I discovered the real meanings behind āblondā and āblondeā but by this time, the damage was done, so to speak 
My point here is that we are all growing and learning as writers and we will always be on this journey together.
Be that as it may be - the simple truth of the matter is that the living language of English is evolving the way it is, regardless of our individual wishes.
4 Likes
I still think itās unsightly, but it does indeed help a lot.
1 Like
Iāve seen the term ādescriptivism vs. prescriptivismā being mentioned here. Anyoneā¦ care to elaborate what does this means?
If Iām allowed to be curious, what should an HG author do when they want to update their game? How do the feedback cycle goes, from reader to author?
You can email a request to COG if you can send in updated files with fixes for HG games to be updated with. I did that for Starship Adventures where I fixed some typos and bugs that were discovered a while after release.
1 Like
Very simplified:
Descriptivism: This word is used to refer to these things, so thatās what it means. (Describing)
Prescriptivism: This word means this thing, so thatās the only thing it should be used to refer to. (Prescribing)
7 Likes
Prescriptivism also tends to come with some heavily classist baggage, since the āright and properā way to speak and write always happens to be skewed heavily toward the styles of language used by the wealthy and educated, with no concern for code and dialect.
Not to say all prescriptivists think like that, but nothing exists in a vacuum.
6 Likes
I was today years old when I learned this. (Iām 32 and a native speaker.) Until just now, I always thought blonde/blond was simply a preference. Iād have argued that brunet was misspelled.
Aside from a āthatās the rule damn it!ā standpoint, I donāt see the practical value in having different words for the same thing. Are you advocating that people adhere to this framework or just pointing out a thing that bothers you?
My pet peeve is incorrectly used semicolons. Unless Iām actually editing something I donāt point them out, but they bug me. So I empathize with your irritation!
And here I thought āblondā and āblondeā are the same just with different spelling like ācolorā and ācolourā. Genderizing objects or body parts are just confusing for me, when I studied german I found that the hardest thing to learn was why der Tisch, an object get masculine pronoun while das Madchen (girl) doesnāt get female pronoun doesnāt really make sense to me. While in my native language (hungarian) we donāt even have āheā or āsheā pronouns, we use the same āÅā word regardless if we talk about a man or a woman. Anyway I guess what Iām trying to say here is just that the differences between languages are interesting.
2 Likes
They: āBlond is for men, blonde is for women. uwuā
Me: āHis hair was BLONDE. His BLONDE hair flowed BLONDELY in the BLONDE wind.ā
2 Likes
Outrageous! Everyone knows the wind is ginger.
12 Likes
ā¦ive always read blond as a universal thing except in predominantly gendered languages. at least in books blond was universal. though armor and color is popping up everywhere with 2 spellings. isnāt Blond and Blonde a French origin thing and not really used in England and USA?
Thatās because Americans decided they didnāt want random āUā's in their words and āsimplifiedā the language.
Youāll also find it in things like goal/jail, randomised/randomized, programme/program etc.
Blond/blonde is different because it was co-opted into English from another language which has gendered words. No big deal, itās just the way it is and technically it is more correct to use blond for male and blonde for female. TBH Iād say people are going to know what youāre talking about whether you use one or the other, and a lot arenāt going to know that theyāre gendered words anyway. Not sure itās really a huge deal imo.
1 Like
gaol, Jacic - and no one uses that in modern English anyway.
Itās also worth noting that itās always āprogramā for computers, just like itās always disk, not disc.
1 Like