twg wrote:
Yeah, I'm with you on this one. Tbh I think Falsifian expressed it well when e talked about seeing the ruleset as some sort of ancient relic - the things like "-or" suffixes, Spivak pronouns, CAN/SHOULD/MUST, "in a timely fashion", etc. are all pieces of history reflecting how the game came to be the way it is. Heck, even a very small amount of the language from the prototypical Nomic is still in the current ruleset!
Including when those pieces were pilfered from someone else's history. (I cribbed the original version of CAN/SHOULD/MUST from RFC 2119; Agora already dealt with the underlying concepts, of course, but without game-wide standard terminology. I think that's by far my biggest thumbprint on the rules, followed by the name of ADoP which is a pop culture reference, and the Fountain whose details I've forgotten, though I found http://zenith.homelinux.net/awj/20020610.txt which indicates that it was some type of loophole in the Power-of-proposals rules.)
