[Noisebridge-discuss] [HAIRSPLITTING] Re: 5 geek fallacies

Jesse Zbikowski embeddedlinuxguy at gmail.com
Fri Feb 26 23:39:11 UTC 2010


On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 11:56 PM, Sai Emrys <noisebridge at saizai.com> wrote:
> Unlike your search, Seth's is not attempting to use popularity to
> determine historical facts, but to determine the *popularity* of a
> collocation.

Well, the idea was to determine the *correctness* of the collocation,
not how many times it's been repeated on the Internet. Trial By Google
represents a familiar kind of confirmation bias: you form a
hypothesis, and test it in a way that can only turn up supporting
evidence. People may well employ this collocation, but that does not
preclude the possibility that there is a different and preferred
construction which doesn't reveal itself in such a search.

All kidding aside, there are a number of forums (mainly geared toward
non-native English speakers) which can offer much more satisfying
analyses of grammatical questions, for the truly curious. However I
suppose meta-grammatical discussions along the lines of "does grammar
have a logical and prescriptive component, or does it merely describe
how people use language" are more or less par for this list.



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