Subject: English vs. computerese (was: Expunge)

From: R R Neuswanger <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 14:41:28 -0400

It so happens that I'm a historian of tongues. I know
very well what the word 'expunge' means in normal English, and
what its history is, too. That does not for one moment imply
that I have some magical insight into the electronic details of
the function which the pine builders choose to designate by that
term -- any more than most native speakers of English would know
what mathematicians choose to designate by such terms as
'everywhere dense,' 'locally differentiable,' 'existential
quantifier,' 'pairwise disjoint,' or a whole host of others. Nor
should they. 
	To suppose otherwise is an abuse of this forum, which
for years has been exemplary in its courtesy to the inquiring. I
have not previously seen an outburst of profanity nor any other
sort of absurd high dudgeon -- especially against a relative
newcomer, least of all from another newcomer.
	What's more, the (online!) manual for pine is one of the
least useful I've encountered: you practically have to be a unix
guru even to find anything in it, let alone make sense of it. It
is true that the context-sensitive help is better -- but, by its
very brevity, often less than an intermediate user really wants.
	In particular, other mailers (such as both of my others) 
have a file13 into which deleted messages go; one can even
sometimes set the default retention period on it. That turns out
to be a useful feature:  if I delete something in error, or only
discover three days later that I had another use for it, I can
still recover. I would wish that pine acquire some such feature
-- unless it's already there (in 3.93) and I haven't spotted it
yet ....
	As for the hothead who couldn't control his ire, I have
put him into a killfile on my skimming reader (I wish pine had
them!), and will bounce anything that comes to my pine
account from that address. Ten to one most of you feel the same.
	-- Hmmm: I wonder if it was even genuine. The diatribe
did seem a little _too_ vacuous, overblown, and long-winded; and
the poster wasn't familiar. Maybe some nut was just looking for
a place to flame something, and Ms. Scanlon was the first target
(s)he found; there are people on the Net who are low enough to
do that .... 

                R.R. Neuswanger, Ph.D., NRA life
[email-masked]                Self-defense: the most
I speak for me. Only.       basic human right.

---

From: Ian Russell Ollmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 16:36:48 -0700

> account from that address. Ten to one most of you feel the same.

The use of the word "bounce" above stumbles on a bit of computerese. It 
gives me an interesting idea, which would make for a fine feature
request for pine, one much enjoyed by the vengeful at heart. Why not add
the option to quickly and easily bounce flames, etc. posted to
newsgroups back the the original author? Every time you read a post and
find it to be full of bile, one click and the author gets a piece of
e-mail saying something like "<Name> found the following post to
<newsgroup> unhelpful, uninformative and unpleasant. He/she has opted to
return it to you. (copy of post follows) ..."

Every bit of nastiness becomes an invitation to participate in a mass
mailbomb.

Impractical? Perhaps. Satisfying? Definitely. 

				Ian Ollmann