On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The issue is a matter of much ado about nothing. Should the Monty Python skit say that it was the parrot's body that was nailed to the perch and not the parrot itself?
In the interests of mutual respect an editor who wants to include the word "body" in his writings is perfectly at liberty to do so, and they should be reassured at the same time that those who omit that same word are not doing so to troll the fears of the taphephobics.
A general adoption of a formula to always include the reference to a "body" (or a synonym thereto) strikes me as an excess of politically correct theology.
Language and the concepts expressed in statements are not "much ado about nothing." And I don't know or care what Monty Python should or should not say, or (your actual point) what people in non-encyclopedic contexts should say.
The point is that its using an English figure of speech to say "Grant is buried in Grant's tomb," rather than using English itself, to say something like "Grant's body is probably just dust at this point." Anyway precision is preferable, is it not, in certain contexts, if not others. What context would I be mainly thinking of?
In this case the idea of bumping up precision in a certain small area reveals some wider human conceptual miasmas with regard to croaking. Which is normal and understandable. The only real problem is that the association of person <=> body comes from that typically excessive qualitative assertion of empiricism that states that life is entirely biological.
Just taking one of the relevant dimensions, the issues with regard to the way English Wikipedia articles translate via mechanical processes (Google Translate is actually usable) to other languages, and what exactly people can derive from those translations, are profoundly relevant to us: The first thing to note is that certain concepts may be missing and thus require expansion to a definition to translate. Secondly, concept-to-word orthographies aren't all the same, though being human means the important ones shouldn't be too far off. And third thing to note is that because idioms are idiomatic (ie. they often don't translate well), it therefore its not a bad idea to curb idiom usage in contexts where information is likely to be translated.
Formal modes of language can handle each of these, and translate quite nicely if one follows certain expansion rules, even where the cultural concepts might be somewhat different. This criticism follows from these notions of expressive formalism, precision, and reducing idiomatic expression - yes, with maybe a little divine orthography thrown in there too.
-Steve