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On 8/6/02 3:08 PM, "John Cowan" <jcowan@reutershealth.com> wrote:
> Bob Hutchison scripsit:
>
>> "facially bogus" means "bogus in a facile way"? Is that what you meant?
>
> No, I meant "bogus on the face of it" (lawyerese, sorry).
>
>> But why did you say that? Unless you believe that "almost idiomatic" is
>> always and obviously better than "not idiomatic"? And thinking otherwise is
>> facile and bogus.
>
> Just bogus. But I do mean that. Remembering to type dot instead of colon
> may be annoying, but interpreting 2.50 as half past two requires far more
> brain cycles.
Only if you remembered to type the dot instead of the colon. If you didn't
then what? Your error messages had better be impeccable or you are going to
dwarf the cycles you are worried about while trying to figure out what's
wrong. "I don't know what the problem is, I wrote '12:15' but it doesn't
work.", our poor user screams.
>
>> Hmmm, user is told "no problem, you get to write things the way you always
>> have, only remember not to use ':' but '.'. Oh, and over here, where you
>> want to write a co-ordinate, remember to write it this way... it'll be easy
>> to remember because it is so similar to what you do now. Oh and over
>> here..." I don't know if I'd be quite so quick to insist that something that
>> is familiar but not normal (idiomatic) is necessarily better than something
>> less familiar solely on the basis of its familiarity.
>
> This was actually a booby trap: the style 12.15 (for a time) is perfectly
> common in the U.K., maybe even standard. But it means 15 minutes after 12,
> not 12.15 hours after midnight.
I don't think it affects the point I was trying to make at all, it never
occurred to me it might have meant 12.15 hours after midnight (Dear User,
don't write 12:15 anymore, write 12.15, and it'll be easy to remember
because it is so similar to how you normally write them, just like all the
other changes we've introduced are easy to remember).
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