Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

tokenadult

"Here are my criteria for selecting (a non domain specific) language to learn."

This is a correct use of the word "criteria" as a plural word.

"Criteria #1 eliminates C and Fortran."

"Criteria #7 eliminates D."

These are incorrect uses of "criteria" as a singular word. One criterion, two criteria.

/English grammar pedantry

View on HN

For God's sake, if you want to help someone to improve his English, then privately email the guy. Keep HN for discussion of the contents of the article. Your distracting comment on the top annoys me much more than those few language errors. The only thing you achieve is that you publically draw attention to the fact that you noted the error and know the correct answer. Well, we just don't care. The guy probably isn't even a native English speaker.

Maybe someone here didn't know about this error ?! So it helps someone, if not you or me.

For every article on HN, there are at least ten readers that can provide remotely related tidbits of information that are interesting to some of the other readers. Half the articles contain at least one language error. The result is that it's easy to drown insightful comments on the article's subject, which caused it to be submitted, in comments that may be interesting in themselves, but are relatively uninteresting in the context of the subject.

I appreciated tel's comment. It contributed something to the conversation that was constructive and informative for anyone who didn't know the usage difference. I tend to skim over that kind of comment quickly if it's something I already know, just like I would for any other content I was already familiar with.

Your angry comment, on the other hand really was distracting. If you have a problem helping out people, even non-native speakers, then don't do it yourself.

ad hominem attack alert

Upvoted.

I hate being a grammar nazi -- but I find I can't help myself. Must have something to do with working in computer code a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com