Delving into the free Writing 101 lessons here.... On Sat, Jan 18, 2025 at 4:16 AM Lawrence Velázquez wrote: > " I find Wiley's main thesis -- that this sentence reads as a sort of topic sentence that implicitly prefixes "alphabetic" to every subsequent use of "character" -- to be pretty contrived.
No, it isn't that the sentence could be read that way, it's that the sentence can't not be read that way. It's ambiguous. Our individual intuitions are fallible of whether people could read something some or other way. The reality is that there are dictionaries and grammar rules that everyone has to some extent - but not fully - used to learn English. According to the definitions and grammar rules of English such an interpretation is valid, which means that people will read it that way, especially considering the scale. "Character" is one of the 500 most common words in English, with 29 or 30 separate non-obsolete meanings. Etymology: "classical Latin -- ambiguus -- undecided, doubtful, wavering, of which the issue is in doubt, of double or mixed form, hybrid, indeterminate, having more than one possible meaning, untrustworthy, unreliable (< ambigere to dispute, quarrel, contend, to be undecided or uncertain, doubt, to call in question, argue about." -- OED In code, ambiguity is reduced by using syntax. In English, ambiguity is reduced by using naming. The names in current use within the man page lack consistency. People understand reality as stories (...and as metaphors). Each thing in the man page is an element in the story of how Bash operates. The word "character," for example, as a jargon term signifying "an abstraction," lacks a specific definition as such within the man page. If you expect for people to know about that "abstraction" meaning, as something separate from the 30 other real meanings, then they should be informed of that. "Word," "set," "function" and "name" are some other good examples, in the top 500. "Operator" and "command" are in the top 2,000. O the Humanities. Wiley - "All our yesterdays light the way." -- Macbeth
