Hacker News Reader

Comment by rottencupcakes | Hacker News Reader

Just fyi, feedback is uncountable, similar to knowledge.

If you want to provide a number, you would say "2 small pieces of feedback"

Thank you! I am not a native speaker and I found this helpful. :)

Another one I see is pushbacks. This one is less clear to me. You can treat it as uncountable like feedback, but you can also say there was a pushback, which maybe makes pushbacks okay? Although no one says it, pushes back seems to me a reasonable option as well.

IMO they are two separate things.

Pushbacks are countable in the context of a debate with both parties present. It’s fine to say “I have two pushbacks on this proposal” because those are specific, countable, contained arguments.

There’s also the nebulous “pushback”, which is used to describe general resistance to an idea or plan in an uncountable way. “The general’s proposal was met with pushback from the oversight committee”.

"Deliverables" is not a real too, yet many consulting companies earn millions preparing them. Because, you know, you dont deliver the deliverables.

I think OP's meaning was clear as it is. No need to put someone down over a small grammar mistake.

Correcting someone’s language is not putting them down.

It certainly tends to be perceived that way by the person corrected. It's also debatable whether nitpicking on someone's grammar is "correcting their language", linguists tend to think it's not: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I’m a non-native English speaker and I always appreciate corrections. Same is true for most non-native speakers I know personally. Most commonly I see this concern for possible offence at being corrected for bad English come from native English speakers, which is peculiar. (I don’t know if it’s true in this instance.)

Anecdotally I have seen the same. It's easy for a native speaker to be offended when corrected because it's their first (and often only) language... they should be good at it. Language-learners tend to be quite open to correction in any language.

I'm a native speaker and I always appreciate corrections.

Getting upset about being corrected means you've got so much hubris as to think that you think you couldn't possibly be making any mistakes, or so much ego as to think you are above being corrected... or both.

To NOT correct people because we might "offend" them leads to a world of clueless idiots thinking they're infallible geniuses.... Crap. We're too late.

The only time I'm annoyed by corrections is when it's halting the conversation and stopping others from progressing towards the goal.

Since this forum has threaded conversations, someone can correct grammar at the same time that someone else is progressing the discussion, so I wouldn't have a problem with it here.

Well, okay, there's another time: If they're obviously being mean about it. But I think most people would dislike that, regardless of context.

I suspect part of this is that there's prescriptivist nitpicking and non-prescriptivist, uh, non-nitpicking.

Pointing out that "feedback" in uncountable is giving information on how to better match actual usage. A prescriptivist will agree with it, but so would a descriptivist.

Contrast this with "lion's share": traditionally, it meant "all", but nowadays is usually used to mean "most, but not all". If I convince someone that they should use it to mean "all", they'll be further from matching actual usage. I think that's what qualifies it as nitpicky and rude vs. just helpful.

In this case, the person was happy to be corrected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35644828

I don't agree with this - it really depends on how it's done. I think the way it was done in this thread was non-accusatory, and generally I find that these suggestions are very helpful. Once you get to a certain level in a second language, your communication tends to be good enough that no-one corrects you any more, which makes it really hard to progress. I really like it when people correct me, FWIW.

That's not my experience when interacting with people communicating in a second language. They generally appreciate the opportunity to learn and improve their (in most cases) English. They also usually love to be taught idioms so that they don't stick out like a sore thumb!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com