Re: Terminology questions

[Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net>]

On Mon, 01 Jul 2013 14:25:06 -0700 Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> On 07/01/2013 11:30 AM, Stephen Berman wrote:
>> if people think "persistently" is wrong here,
>> and "permanently" doesn't lead to the expectation that only one change
>> is possible, then the latter is fine with me.
>
> "persistently" is fine, but "persistently change" confused me.
> E.g., "stars persistently change in color and brightness
> during their evolution" means that stars are always
> changing, but the Emacs doc intended to say that the setting change
> persists through Emacs restarts, not that the setting is always
> changing.  I changed it to "permanently" because I was too
> lazy to reword the sentence, but if "persistent" is
> preferable then it'd be fine to reword the doc to say
> something like "make the change persistent".
>
>> The other case involves two places where I wrote "cross-categorial",
>> which Paul changed to "cross-category"
>
> I used "cross-category" over "cross-categorial" because the
> former is in aspell's dictionary and the latter is not --
> sorry, I wasn't familiar with either term.  If you intend
> the social-science connotation please change it back to
> "cross-categorial", otherwise I suggest leaving it alone as
> "cross-category" is less likely to furrow readers' brows.
>
> Neither of these is a big deal, of course; please feel
> free to revert both of my changes.

Thanks for the explanations.  I've decided to avoid the confusing terms
altogether and reworded the doc in revision 113288; it's more verbose
but hopefully clearer.

Steve Berman