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Nachimir

Video games video-games videogames

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It's very nice to hear this. I think in language there will and must always be a struggle between how it's done according to current uses and grammar, and embracing new ways of writing things under the influence of memetic change and mutation.

It really depends on the particular example what I do with language. video games, as one word, is far more appealing to me than video games. I think that's a key ingredient for me: what's the most beautiful? I will gladly go for harbour, labour, honour and other English ways of writing things, yet be American in other respects. Since I'm Dutch, I don't feel the need to be either at all times.

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Ultrabooks

Belly laugh. Thank you for lightening me up, everyone :)

Then why are you going through the effort of capitalization, standard written forms for words and such? Chances are you made a typo at some point when typing that (maybe superfluous, caused trouble for me at least). Why fix them? We'll get what you're saying.

I think SignorSuperDouche is right about language, as are you. There are conventions and they are useful, but they're not static. There's a constant push-pull between present culture and history that continually modifies things. Deviating from too many conventions raises the cognitive load required to understand something, but we can easily cope with the odd Americanism, misspelling or unhyphenated term.

I was in two minds whether to post anything at all on this, since I've seen this debate before and ignored it, reasoning that I shouldn't even legitimise it. However, seeing a respected developer and one of our own podcast guests wade in with erroneous, misleading bullshit really concerns me. I really want the debate over video games versus video games dead. If it were a person, I'd drag it into an alley and smother it with a pillow. It shouldn't even be an issue, except internally at publications.

The subsequent discussion of language here is really interesting though :)

ignore

This is a real thread? Huh!

/ignore

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A polite, "Wrestle, you're a cunt," would've sufficed.

I agree with you, we can both be cunts together.

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That's surprising. I'd say pretty much 95% of any art form is crap, so poetry is pretty well off.

Including video games (video games (video-games))?!

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Anecdote :

For a while, I had mistakenly put "jeu-vidéos" (that would be videos-game in english) on my blog's main banner and it used to drive one of the admin crazy. So much, in fact, that he redid the banner all by himself with a proper spelling and commited it while I wasn't looking.

Aaah, the untapped power of angry vocabularists.

Edited by vimes

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Ah the futility of language. I remember my housemates (both English Literature students at the time) coming back from a talk given by a linguist and fuming that the linguist had basically told them that language was pointless and only what you imply with your communication was even remotely valid.

The only thing that has made me cringe in recent years was someone who thought that when I used the trm 'apathetic' I meant 'lethargic' and went on to tell me that that was what 'apathetic' actually meant.

This also reminds me of a friend of mine who worked on computer and robot AI, he watched this episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk makes a super computer blow up by soiling its logic and said it was funny because it probably would have only taken a simple 'How are you?' to fuck up most current AI routines. Apparently this question is extremely confusing.

PS: The English language may change but I'm not accpeting the term 'winningest' into my vocabulary, no matter what.

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Ah the futility of language. I remember my housemates (both English Literature students at the time) coming back from a talk given by a linguist and fuming that the linguist had basically told them that language was pointless and only what you imply with your communication was even remotely valid.

Thing is, the more precise your use of language, the more confident you can be that the reader interprets your writing in the way you intended. You can "imply" all sorts of things but fail as a writer if no-one perceives it. Same goes for oration.

AS for the original post - I agree. It is not important. There may eventually be a 'correct' spelling for the term, but that will evolve rather than be decided and we won't be able to tell what it is for a couple more decades or so. Language changes, but it doesn't change daily.

Edited by DanJW

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Doh, that's what happens when you start to rely on in-browser spell-check.

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Ah the futility of language. I remember my housemates (both English Literature students at the time) coming back from a talk given by a linguist and fuming that the linguist had basically told them that language was pointless and only what you imply with your communication was even remotely valid.

I don't know, without language it would be pretty hard to organize most abstract thoughts, I'd have said. The specifics are incidental, to a certain extent, but without sufficient vocabulary, it would, I think, be very difficult to get very far with one's thoughts.

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The specifics are incidental, to a certain extent, but without sufficient vocabulary, it would, I think, be very difficult to get very far with one's thoughts.

Have you read 1984? It explores that theory to terrifying effect.

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Never to completion, although I've absorbed some stuff about Newspeak and so on, as I'm sure we all have. Weirdly, I didn't really make the connection. I'm a little disappointed in myself.

I have, somewhat patronizingly, sometimes wondered how much poor grasp of one's first tongue hinders one's capacity for thought. I wouldn't want to extend the idea too far -- verbosity does not necessarily equate to intelligence, nor the reverse -- but for people who only seem capable of forming basic sentences, how much harder must it be to properly contemplate something? I guess it depends how well suited the brain's "internal language" is for whatever the subject is, I suppose. Perhaps I'm seeing things from a very narrow viewpoint. Perhaps not.

On the subject of Newspeak, I wonder how hard it would be to actually instigate or enforce such a thing. My intuition is that the real risk is not so much the limitation of thought, but its subversion. I suspect people will always find a way to say what they want, but through clever manipulation of language, perhaps you can alter what they mean, and how concepts relate. A little conflation here, a little imaginary distinction there, and you might find that the previously outrageous now seems reasonable. Maybe. Maybe not.

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By the way, I don't agree with the linguist. Well I do but only from a day-to-day perspective, for example when I chat to some one about something fairly inane. If they understnad what I was getting at (eg: I had a good night, drank beer and played games) then it seems irrelevant how I said and whether I got the tense on verbs right.

From a writing perspective it bothers me a lot more, even if my spelling is atrocious, and I like intricacies/idiosyncracies of literature.

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The in-browser spell-check is your confidant.

In the interests of diversionary pedantry, I'd argue this would be 'confidante', which fits with the western european fashion of ascribing female characteristics to inanimate objects. :grin:

[Edit] Very, VERY late though. I've only just read it. :getmecoat

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:buyme: *shake* *shake* *shake*

http://www.gamestyleguide.com/

Pissing on the embers of this discussion, I know.

That was part of the spat on Twitter that made me start this thread. He advocates "Video game" as *the* correct term, whereas some very good and well respected industry sites consistently use "video game".

It's not as if that book came from any kind of industry consensus, and for all I know they might have some good reasoning behind their choices. The approach though, on behalf of any term, that everyone should use language in the same way and have identical standards is purebred fucking nonsense, and difference in usage from one outlet to another is a non-issue to boot.

English is not an IEEE standard. It does not have a specification. Culture and language just don't work that way. Dictionaries get revised to include new words and sometimes new spellings. Americanisations and present English spellings intermingle in the wild and breed rampantly despite nitpicky efforts to keep them apart and ensure the eventual victory of a pure, separatist master race of words. Very, very old spellings have all but died out, though the expletives we use and they way some words express refined culture still have roots in the Norman conquest of Britain over 900 years ago, and the resulting relegation of Anglo-Saxon terms to the serfs (for instance "Shit" is derived from Saxon speech, "Excrement" from French).

People use, reuse, abuse and adapt their native tongues, losing the roots of all these mods through generations. No matter how many people want to make demands or issue decrees around it, they're pissing in the wind and I'll gladly piss on them.

Once again, the excellent Stephen Fry on this issue.

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