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Comment by vezycash | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear is safer than solar?

(Couldn't read the article, because the read more button needs JavaScript.)

They specifically said rooftop solar. I imagine it's the rooftop part where the deaths come from.

The materials and quantities of said materials, needed to make solar panels, are dug up from the ground, mines are not very safe.

It's probably totally against the Hacker News comment guidelines for me to say this, but do you think people could perhaps stop globally replacing "the" with "said"? This meme, or whatever it is, is getting rather old and rather irritating. But if for some reason people feel it's necessary, by all means carry on and I'll try not to complain again.

The use totally fits the definition:

adjective: said

1. used in legal language or humorously to refer to someone or something already mentioned or named.

It's not a meme, it's a valid use of that word.

Sure. It's used in patents, for example. But recently it has been massively overused in online discussions and it's no longer funny (if it ever was). It seems to roughly fit this definition of "meme": "an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users".

Clearly this is the wrong place for this discussion. Is there a right place to discuss it, from a linguistic/sociological/stylistic point of view? Not that I really should... I'm just trying to avoid an unpleasant task that I really ought to be doing.

>Is there a right place to discuss it, from a linguistic/sociological/stylistic point of view?

The first place that springs to mind is https://english.stackexchange.com/

I've seen other forums with good quality contributions on topics like this, I think one of them was for people speaking English as a second language looking for advice from native speakers. The name eludes me at the moment but if I come across it again I'll respond here with it.

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