'Twas brillig, and Lennart Poettering at 15/10/12 16:59 did gyre and gimble: > On Mon, 15.10.12 09:41, Andrew Eikum ([email protected]) wrote: > > Heya, > >> >> As you likely know, Arch Linux is in the process of moving to systemd. >> So I was reading through the various systemd docs and quickly became >> baffled by this new abbreviation "resp.", which I've never seen before >> in my English-mother-tongue life. >> >> Some quick Googling turned up a reference: >> <http://www.transblawg.eu/index.php?/archives/870-Resp.-and-other-non-existent-English-wordsNicht-existente-englische-Woerter.html> >> >> I guess it's a literal translation of the German "beziehungsweise", but >> English doesn't work the same way. The word "respectively" is used >> exclusively to provide an ordering connection between two lists. E.g. >> "the prefixes k, M, and G refer to kilo-, mega-, and giga-, >> respectively." It is also never abbreviated to "resp." So the sentence >> "Sets the default output resp. error output for all services and >> sockets" makes no sense to a natural English speaker. >> >> This patch removes all instances of "resp." in the man pages and >> replaces them with sentences which are much more clear and, hopefully, >> grammatically valid. In almost all instances, it was simply replacing >> "resp." with "or," which the original author could probably just do in >> the future to avoid this problem. >> >> The only other instances of "resp." are in the src/ subtree, which I >> don't feel privileged to correct. >> <term><option>--until=</option></term> >> >> <listitem><para>Start showing entries >> - newer or of the specified date, >> - resp. older or of the specified >> + newer than the specified date, >> + or older than the specified > > Hmmm, as I understood the text you linked this usage is actually > correct, as "resp." means "each separately in the order mentioned", > which is precisely what is meant here. The diff doesn't show it, but > this section is about both --since= and --until, hence we explain the > meaning of --since= first, and then of --until=, and link this with > "resp.".
I think using resp. is fine, but the wording above was still "weird" (tho' I'm looking at it out of context, so feel free to ignore me!) I think: Start showing entries newer or of the specified date resp. older or of the specified.. would IMO be better written as: Start showing entries occurring on or after (resp. before) the specified date. > So, now I am really confused, what's really right and wrong here? ;-) > >> <literal>tomorrow</literal> are >> understood, which refer to 00:00:00 of >> the day before the current day, the >> - current day, resp the day after the >> + current day, or the day after the > > same here: we first list the possible strings, and then their meanings, > in the same order. Perhaps parenthesis could clarify some of the resp. usage here too? >> <para>The four calls return the number of entries >> advanced/set back on success or a negative errno-style >> - error code. When the end (resp. beginning) of the journal >> + error code. When the end (or beginning) of the >> journal > > This appears to be correct usage of "resp", again as this describes > sd_journal_next, as well as sd_journal_resp. Yes and I think resp. is better than an or here as it clearly defines the differences between the two options outlined, rather than just a "normal" 'or' that is in the sentence structure generally. Col -- Colin Guthrie gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/ Open Source: Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/ PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/ Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/ _______________________________________________ systemd-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
