I’ve found that one of the more reliable ways to activate the local pedant population in any given situation is to quote lyrics from the 1996 Alanis Morissette song “Ironic”. It’s like rain, on your wedding day!
A song about irony full of examples where none of them are irony is pretty ironic. It’s a real case of “task failed successfully”.
Um, ackshully, “last” in this context is clearly using the definition of “previous”, not “final”.
No wonder that guy’s going to meetings, he needs practice to be a better pedant.
Most of them do, honestly. If you are going to do a thing, you might as well be at least good at it.
One of the greatest things I learned from studying linguistics and language, and knowing a lot of people from a lot of dispersed cultural backgrounds… is to just roll with it because life is short and communicating effectively is fucking difficult. If you can get by with “good enough to convey the message as intended”, you’ve actually managed a supreme feat. Because a message has so many layers, like an ogre, it’s so hard to get them all right every time.
This is a good point. Like not fully understanding someone due to an accent or the language used not being their first. You can still hear things and get clues, and often decipher what’s been said. Or, you can focus on those differences and miss the entire thing altogether! Then, double down and claim people need to learn the language… It doesn’t always work, but it’s a skill if you can understand people in this way.
While I was in college I took a TESL course (teaching English as a second language) thinking I could learn some strategies to apply to language learning in general, selfishly for myself.
I was wrong, it was intended for teaching kids, but it opened my eyes to a really open blending way of doing things. One that literally teaches empathy and racial/ethnic equality without explicitly doing so.
There are some hybrid classes that aim to teach mutual language skills to native speakers of two to four tongues (each kid having one home language of course), so they start early, move on as a group, and everyone is on the same unequal footing. They see each other struggle, they help each other learn. It is literally a way to teach empathy with diversity and make everyone better :). And the best part is these are all early education programs so they get them in elementary and stop before highschool because they know enough to keep going and have a social support structure to practice with.
I hope something like this picks up more widely, since it’s gaining traction in “large minority” areas and can only benefit literally everyone :)
Active listening is a powerful tool, and it kind of shows how little of communication is actually word based
so technically, it would be the most recent complete meeting, i.e. not an ongoing meeting, but already completed, but the most recent completed one that isn’t the one thats currently going on, because the one that’s currently happening isn’t complete yet, and the rule states that it must be complete. But once this currently happening meeting IS completed, it will become the most recent meeting.
But how does the next meeting get defined?
Any sane person in such a situation would just use the dates. “As you recall, during the April 23 meeting…”
what if you’re holding it across international datelines?
Those in attendance would be aware. The chair said “as you might recall,” implying that they were present at the previous meeting.
What year?
Given that the facilitator is insufficiently pedantic while reciting the minutes from the previous meeting, I would assume that the club has not existed for long enough that the year could be ambiguous.
Or wouldn’t “previous” be easier?
previous is still up to debate on semantical terms as to how you define the currently on going meeting. If it’s previous to the ongoing meeting that is happening at this very instance, than yeah sure, it’s the previous meeting. But if we’re only talking about meetings that have been completed, and have happened in the past, than previous could refer to the most recent complete meeting, or the one prior to that, depending on context. Which is not very explicitly clear.
Ok. As all of yours previously might recall to remember as per from the last recent meeting, we were unanimously divided on the topic whence we should label our sign on the door with capitol letters or lower base letters.
Misinterpreting contextually appropriate diction is not pedantry.
You should start going to meetings
But they should participate, so technically they should attend meetings.
Well attending doesn’t necessarily imply participating.
…Will someone please forward the meeting invite to me? I’d like to attend. Whether I participate is yet to be seen.
…and we don’t have deer/frog eyes. Wow, this conversation has gone off the rails.
Technically, there were no rails to begin with. So, if the conversation was never on the the non-existent rails, it certainly could not have gone off them.
Well, it’s yet to be HEARD. Unless we’re able to see all participants at the same time
Technically.
🤔
I like this club.
Our previous meeting?
I glanced at a few dictionaries, and it appears last as an adjective here is perfectly valid, meaning “next before the present”.
personally, i would go with “prior meeting”
Technically all the meetings we’ve had before this one are prior.
Our most recent prior meeting to this one.
I mean, I wouldn’t exactly call it a meeting…
Hmmm, our prior meeting.
No wait, the prior meeting.
Previous?
This club’s meeting dated so and so date and day of the gregorian calendar
The ackshully faces of the two blue shirts are perfect
So Lemmy
Actually, there are multiple Lemmy instances and each one has a different foundation and general culture. Some are gay and pedantic, some are racist and pedantic, and some are pendantically excited about the brutal expansion of the Russian empire.
The more inconsequential the topic, the more insistent the deliberate failure to understand.
Ackshualemmy…
Umm… guys, I regret to inform you, but this is the Pedants Club
There is no ‘the’ Pedants Club as their are multiple Pedants Clubs throughout the internet. Giving any single one a definite article would be misleading.
It is correct to say last. In french we can say “dernier en date” meaning latest but we usually drop the last 2 words, and only “last” remains
Last would be the one before the current one, not the current one.
Technically the correct term is “prior.”
More accurately, “prior” is much less ambiguous than “last” and thus more likely to satisfy the predilections of a pedant.
Gosh I love the depth of pedantry available to descriptivists!
