> Your pointing out a trivial error that didn't significantly impact the intelligibility of my comment adds absolutely nothing to the conversation except demonstrating that you have superior English skills to mine (which I suspect was entirely the point).
If you had posted a flawed math equation, or a defective computer program snippet, would you make the same objection to a correction? Would a mathematical correction offered in good faith merit this criticism, or would it be welcomed as a useful contribution?
The answer is obvious -- spoken and written language is to a human what computer programming language is to a computer. Both should be open to correction. And for some reason I cannot fathom, one of them is welcomed and the other criticized, as though biological processors should be treated differently than silicon processors.
> In addition if we are going to be rigourously accurate I will point out that merriam-webster ...
Dictionaries don't prescribe, they describe. No matter how bizarre a word usage, if it appears in publications, it finds its way into the dictionary. So it's not a substantive argument to point out that a word meaning appears in a dictionary -- all of them end up there.
If you had posted a flawed math equation, or a defective computer program snippet, would you make the same objection to a correction? Would a mathematical correction offered in good faith merit this criticism, or would it be welcomed as a useful contribution?
The answer is obvious -- spoken and written language is to a human what computer programming language is to a computer. Both should be open to correction. And for some reason I cannot fathom, one of them is welcomed and the other criticized, as though biological processors should be treated differently than silicon processors.
> In addition if we are going to be rigourously accurate I will point out that merriam-webster ...
Dictionaries don't prescribe, they describe. No matter how bizarre a word usage, if it appears in publications, it finds its way into the dictionary. So it's not a substantive argument to point out that a word meaning appears in a dictionary -- all of them end up there.