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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's quite a stretch for a title ambiguity: attorney general or soft drink?

Submitted title was "AG Barr Will Ask Zuckerberg To Halt Plans For End-To-End Encryption".

I mean, I doubt that many UK natives know the name of the US Attorney General off the top of their heads. It seems like a reasonable mixup to me.

Reasonable to think that a soft drink provider would ask FB to not use end-to-end encryption?

But I agree that AG should be expanded.

They realized that something was off, obviously. They were just saying it was confusing at first because without the context of knowing who Barr is, "AG" is a nonsense word. The only remaining parse is a soft-drink company.

Entirely reasonable! I didn't mean that one end of the stretch was less natural than the other, just that it was a long one.

(On another note, it's amazing how easy it is for a comment can sound like a bit of a putdown inadvertently. Even after years of practice trying to skirt around such misinterpretations. Tone of voice and body language must be the greater part of how we avoid this in person.)

A stretch if you have the context of a US reader but imagine if the chief medic in the UK were called Dr Pepper and, well, the rest writes itself :)

Oh, I didn't mean it was a stretch for a UK reader to read "AG Barr" that way—as I now know, that's obviously what it means there.

By 'stretch' I just mean that there's quite a distance between an attorney general and a soft drink. Usually the things that get conflated are not so incongruous.

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