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Comment by taylorius | Hacker News Reader

I'm a native English speaker, and I partially disagree with your claims of awkwardness.

"when our servers are under high traffic pressure" - this is a bit awkward I agree, but only the last three words.

If we rearrange it to "when our servers are under pressure from high traffic", I think it sounds good. It's using a metaphor, and I think that should be encouraged. It's interesting. And the phrase "high traffic" conveys some drama.

"your requests may take some time to receive a response from the server" - I think that's fine, to be honest. I like it.

I think you are conflating "awkwardness" with linguistic flair. Technical documentation English has become standardised to a large degree, which of course is useful, and efficient. But it is also a narrow usage of English, and breaking out of its straitjacket does not make language awkward.

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That’s a very generous interpretation. I don’t know mandarin but these are likely a transfer of grammar constructs from the primary language to english, in the same way the Dutch will say “make a picture” or “the house of my parents”, which can be justly classified as awkward rather than as linguistic flair.

If someone was editing my writing, it would feel a bit patronizing if they said grammar mistakes (many of which come from my mother tongue Portuguese) are “adding flair”, as they are not a stylistic choice.

I'm not claiming it was intentional on their part. My point was solely one of language, so how the sentence came to be written that way is out of scope. And given the word swap I suggested, I don't think it is awkward at all (unlike your examples from Dutch, which definitely are).

As for it being patronising, why is telling a non-native speaker their sentence is interesting unacceptable, but telling them it's awkward is ok? (Assuming both are genuinely held opinions).

I'll reiterate my point that common English usage (non-awkward?) has narrowed enormously in the last 50 years. I think that this is a bad thing.

Your point of how the social norms for English have changed over the last 50 years could be interesting but what does it have to do with the parents point of "these docs seem human written and not spell checked which is very different from the other ai companies AND which is weird anyway for a megacompany with ai tools that write English well".

Which part is it that has linguistic flair? Is it "The prices listed below are in unites of per 1M tokens", or "The expense = number of tokens × price"? Or maybe "you may continuously receive contents in the following formats"?

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