Re: spoon-discuss: Neatening up - English

["Glotmorf" <glotmorf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/1/02 at 4:30 AM Dan Waldron wrote:

>> A. English
>>
>> In all cases, the meaning of a term in the rules that is not specified as
>> having a specific meaning shall have the meaning granted to it by common
>use
>> of the english language and the context surrounding the use of the word.
>
>We'd better not enact this unless we are prepared to go through the entire
>ruleset and catch every single slip-up first.  Right now our usage is
>quite inconsitant.  And even then our rules will start to look like
>they've been written in German.
>
>I used to always capitalize defined words, back at about the time when I
>joined Berserker; but I don't like to do this so much anymore because it
>makes me feel like I'm shouting.
>
>Everything else in your proposal I am willing to support.
>
>I think that most of the defined-word/natural-word confusion could be
>avoided if we are just more careful to define our terms when we propose
>rules.

That's good for the future, but there's some status quo holes to be considered.  There is, for example, no in-game definition of "entity", "vote", "object", "rule", "permissible" or many other commonly used words in the rules.  I suspect that if anyone raised a fuss about this, the response would be that the meanings of those words are "known".  What, then, is the criteria for determining which English words are "known" and which aren't?

						Glotmorf