Pet Peeve of the Day: Prior

Priority is when something has to come first because of importance or its place in a series of steps. For example, “my wife has a prior claim on my affections.”

If all you mean is earlier of before, say that. Here’s an example of this misuse of prior. Two, actually:

Using our system, we detect anti-adblockers on 30.5% of the Alexa top-10K websites which is 5-52 times more than reported in prior literature. Unlike prior work which is limited to detecting visible reactions (e.g., warning messages) by anti-adblockers, our system can discover attempts to detect adblockers even when there is no visible reaction.

All they mean is earlier. I’m pretty sure these folks aren’t suggesting that the earlier literature and work are more important or ought to be read first.

Should I also mention their misuse of “which” when they should use “that”?  Nah, I already covered that.

Academics can be so pretentious. Harrumph.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Well, according to Perry Bible Fellowship, the Orca thinks not…

Unless the cartoonist is suggesting that reality is more important than spelling. On closer examination I see the Orca got the whole group of penguins, not just the lecturer. Hmm.

Two comics about spelling in one day! How can I resist???

By the way, don’t trust your spell checker a whole lot.

We all know this abbreviation. I just ran into a comment by a certain Vykki in the comments below a comic about a deaf person who texted to a hearing person who wasn’t very good at ASL. Vykki’s comment was so well written, I’ll quote it:

I’ve also heard people say “LOL” out loud—either as “ell oh ell” or “lawl”—while not actually laughing. Basically, LOL has evolved to be something other than an abbreviation for “laughing out loud”, in much the same way that “ok” is no longer an abbreviation. (There’s a fun thought: 150 years from now, people might say, “Did you know that ‘eloel’ came from ‘laughing out loud’? That’s crazy!” Assuming they remember its origins at all—the origins of many words and phrases, including “ok”, are debated, and perhaps that one will be too.)

I got permission to quote her, of course.

I have maybe twice heard someone say this abbreviation out loud. Perhaps Vykki is right—we’re seeing linguistic change in action!

Okay, here’s the comic, called Girls with Slingshots. They prefer not to make it easy to copy the comic itself, so here’s the address:

 http://girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-chaser-980

Look what Dilbert said to derogate this document: Full of typos!

The rule: typographical errors matter. I wrote about this in the past more than once.

Sigh. A couple days later Scott repeated the joke:

And a subtle dig—the gal is their tech writer. She could see what the developer couldn’t.

That’s why you need us tech writers: we can see things you can’t.

An essay today, and a little linguistics. The other day I mentioned the singular they. This isn’t that, even though we could use a word for that, too. See yesterday’s post for mention of the best solution to that problem that I’ve found so far: rewrite the whole sentence.

What we need is an improvement on the word “we.” When you use “we,” whom are you including? You and the guy you’re talking to, or you and the guy with you? (And then there’s the plural of majesty, when you mean only yourself, but I digress.)

A pidgin language someplace in the western Pacific has a good solution:

youme, which means me and you, the guy I’m talking to.

mefellah, which means me and the guy with me, but not you.

Sometimes, especially when you’re trying to persuade someone skeptical to agree with you, using a version of “we” that indicates whether or not you’re including the person you’re talking to.

And all this reminds me of the old Lone Ranger joke:

The Lone Ranger and Tonto were on a hilltop completely surrounded by antagonistic Indians. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, “Looks like we’re in a tight spot, doesn’t it?”
Tonto replies, “Who’s ‘we,’ Paleface?”

So there you have it. Should we, um, youme start a movement?

PS—Ran into this today. Not sure what kind of “we” this is. Maybe a “youme” used to mean “you”?