On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 5:04 AM, Jeff King <p...@peff.net> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 06:58:48AM +0100, Thomas Rast wrote: >> Eric Sunshine <sunsh...@sunshineco.com> writes: >> > On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 8:52 AM, Thomas Rast <tr...@student.ethz.ch> wrote: >> >> This is a bit hacky and should really be replaced by equivalent >> >> support in --follow, and just using that. However, in the meantime it >> > >> > s/using/use/ >> >> I'm not a native speaker, but I really think 'using' is more correct >> here. > > Cannot...resist...grammar discussion. > > I think you are both potentially right. > > You might consider the two items "equivalent support" and "using that" > to be two noun phrases that are objects of the preposition "by", and > that the writer simply omits the second "by" after the "and". In which > case you are making a noun phrase from a verb phrase, and would want to > use the gerund form "using". And the sentence, simplifying out some > modifiers and adding the missing "by" (which is fine to omit, but the > parts of speech become much clearer with it there), looks like: > > ...should be replaced by equivalent support, and by using that. > > However, you could also argue that the final clause is a second verb > phrase for "this should" which just omits the extra "should" (which is > also OK in a list. In which case "use" acts as a verb, and parses as: > > ...should be replaced by equivalent support, and this should just use > that. > > So I think it is correct either way, and though it parses slightly > differently, the overall meaning is the same. > > Phew. Totally not worth that much discussion, but for some reason I find > these sorts of ambiguous language cases interesting.
Wishing to avoid bike-shedding the commit message, I suggested s/using/use/ as a minor change to help clarify the grammar a bit. However, perhaps it could be rephrased as: This is a bit hacky and should really be replaced by equivalent support in --follow, which can then be employed instead. -- ES -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
