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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

Eh, no need to call in the Grammar Squad. Not to mention effect is correct here (effect means ‘to bring something about as a result’). Hacker News did bring something about as a result.

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Grammar Squad here with the facts. And just the facts.

When effect is a verb, the object must be the change itself, similar to cause: "Hacker News effected a significant deterioration in site availability". With affect, the thing being changed is the object: "Hacker News affected the site."

In Iain M Banks (RIP) Culture novels, the remote manipulation technology is called the Effector.

Any chance this is related to the relevant biological/neurological/robotics terminology?

Thanks for that input but HN is a casual site, not a uber professional one (i.e. place where most people look for jobs). I'm pretty sure we all know what it means.

Yes, everyone knows what it means. But if you make a claim like "effect is correct here" you are entering the debate, so don't call the debate off-topic when you lose.

Sadly I left that part out of the original claim. My apologies for perhaps sounding condescending.

Correction was imo: a) correct (was proven false by you) b) unnecessary - pedantry is only OK in strictly professional context, which I don't consider HN to be. This was omitted from original claim by my error ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY).

I really meant to thank you for correcting me there i.e. "Thanks for that input". It might have came of as sarcastic, but was not my intention. There is nothing (of value) to win/lose in a debate. In fact losing debate is more enlightening.

The problem is that the "Hacker News effect" is a noun, derived from the slashdot effect, and here that noun has been verbed.

What nobody's quoted xkcd yet? http://xkcd.com/326

Was thinking about that :P

Very good, but the Grammar Squad are not amateurs, and we have not been tripped up!

"Eh, no need to call in the Grammar Squad."

Obviously, as this is in the purview of the Lexicology Squad, not the Grammar Squad.

"Hacker News did bring something about as a result."

Except that Hacker News did not bring about the existence of the linked site, which would be the actual meaning of "effected the site".

Technically our mental lexicon is part of what constitutes grammar (as understood by linguists).

Could you elaborate on that? Since that doesn't make too much sense to me. From what I know, the movement goes in the opposite direction: much of what was considered "grammar" in the past has been reinterpreted as a part of the lexicon, now that we actually have adequate technology to work with humongous corpora.

Sure. Linguists consider grammar to basically be what a person knows in order to say they are a fluent speaker of their language, which includes understanding words in that language. More narrowly speaking, lexical information is tied to syntactic information because certain syntactic constraints are imposed by our lexicons.

Right, but it did not effect the site, it effected the site's downtime (the downtime is the result). I believe the usage is incorrect.

That's one of my favorite things about HN. People (typically) don't jump on top of the minor grammatical errors, typos, and misusages that pretty much everyone who doesn't triple-check their posts is inclined to make.

Unless they're particularly egregious, they're generally ignored and the content of the post is focused on instead.

Correct, i was just trying to be witty ;-)

And they were effectively affectionate in their response.

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