By “linguistic whims” is meant a silly preoccupation with issues like the traditional “royal we” in scientific discourse. Newton himself would be hijacked on this Forum. The noise has not been solved, its been increased.
This is a meta thread about the style of discussion in the appropriate category.
I don’t regard this as noise as it’s kept out of technical threads.
This sort of topic does add non-technical noise to the site overall. Technical topics are also constantly disrupted by the over-blown Netiquette concerns, like “writing for ten-year-olds” where genuine technical content is attacked for “big words”, in a weasel-hunt spirit.
Working aerospace engineers do not lose much time quibbling over “weasel-words”. Imagining Netiquette to be a proper AWE Forum “meta”-topic imposes a non-engineering priority.
Yes, if they were properly educated they will have had their writing corrected when their writing became problematic. Good engineers will communicate clearly so they shouldn’t have this problem.
Again, this is not about netiquette, this is not about etiquette. It’s about writing clearly.
1 Like
As if Newton did not write clearly enough in Principia with the “we” convention. Engineers are judged by their engineering, not their language quirks.
Let’s move away from this particular example! @kitefreak we now know what you meant.
You can have your pluralis majestatis 
(I still think the distinction between oneself and a group including oneself is valuable)
I think we can all agree that writing clearly is a good thing and appeals to anonymous authority make it more difficult to judge the trustworthyness of the argument.
This is about wrongful moderation of sound posting, like my Kite Networks technical posts, which were interrupted on the subjective pretext of undue “bickering”.
Look at the bright side, the Kite Networks topic has been “cooled”.
Good to see a forum willing to stand up to an ongoing “insidious abuse” of the English language. Which reminds me of JoeF censoring (deleting) my posts for even mentioning the ability to understand the English language (used on the forum) “because someone may not speak English” or something like that. Any excuse to brush away factual content. Of course if they didn’t speak English, they would probably not be reading what I wrote, but what I really meant was the ability to understand ANY written communication. It is an example of the absurdities suffered over the last decade by me and several others in attempting to discuss AWE online.
By the way I agree with Santos that every use of the term “we” is not problemmatic. It;s not the mere terms that are the problem, it’s the abuse of the terms and ANY term can be abused. For example Santos often uses terms like “the forum” to refer to his own postings. It’s a ruse to convey an illusion that his own, personal opinion, expressed on his own personal forum reflects some wider agreement among many people. It’s like when animals puff themselves up with air, and spread the feathers or fur, to seem larger and more intimidating than they really are. Such abuse of language by Sntos (and maybe some of us also do it sometimes) has been so relentless and pervasive as to have been a huge problem for the old forum on Yahoo. I also think it may be difficult to categorize exactly when the use of some word is “abuse”. Seems to me that no matter how many rules are made, people who habitually abuse language to try to sound more authoritative than they really are will find alternate ways. Its not a matter so much of setting down rule that will solve it, it’s more about the nature of the people involved, in my opinion. Habitual shortcuts in language commonly used without a problem are instead used as an assault weapon. So many abuses can fit into single sentence that you could spend the rest of your life arguing about it, flagging “off-topic” or "who is “we” today? Trying to stop it is like trying to get a grip on an oil-covered water-balloon - you just can’t get a grip on it because it’s just too slippery and keeps changing shape. t some point you realize it’s not so much a “word” thing s a “people” thing. Words are just tools. Any tool can be abused. Having said that, it sometimes appears to even me, that people here are giving Santos too much nitpicking sometimes. Well, you’ve created (another) monster. All I can say is “good luck” - which is another term he tends to abuse - as someone recently pointed out: does he really mean it? Do I? 
1 Like
Let Doug be the standard of preferred language here. I really do wish everyone well, and do not understand why even that sort of language is worried about, rather than a relentless focus on the engineering.
I’ll stop commenting about language use for a while. I can see you are trying to write clearly in this forum.
1 Like
According to the Wikipedia introduction at top of this page, “Weasel” refers to “anonymous authority”.
The only true “anonymous authority” on this Forum is moderator Windy Skies, who demands anonymity in enforcing wrongful authority over posting.
All other instances are helpfully clarified upon demand.
I’ll (temporarily) unlist this topic. I don’t like the casual reader to see too much meta stuff.
Read the article and this topic again to better understand the context and concept. It’s an appeal to anonymous authority that is the problem.
2 Likes
You are appealing to your own anonymous authority, the most hypocritical possible situation.
Now you are hiding your diagnostic weasel topic, and everyone’s writing on the subject.
I do not recall a single human regret on your part for the upset caused by you controlling others from anonymous authority.
Your implying that anyone else is the weasel if they do not provide a source fast enough, and asserting your moderator powers so intrusively, that is the real problem with anonymous authority here.
This topic should be preserved in public view, for evidence of how Windy Skies thinks, behind the wrongful practice of anonymous authority messing up actual technical content.