Hi Peter
I tend to disagree. I am not a native English speaker, although I will admit to
watching way too much American TV in my teens.
I believe most of these should be recognizable to anyone who has learned enough
English to participate meaningfully in IETF mailing lists and discussions. What
you haven't seen before, you can usually either deduce ("cosmic significance"
would obviously mean a lot of significance), or else easily searchable on the
net or in idiom books, although I did get some incorrect results searching
google for "warm fuzzy feeling".
Yes, we should keep both messages and documents straight-forward, and avoid
cultural references and memes (like "home base" or "I do have a Dalek but I do
not yet have a Tardis", or any reference to taking arrows to the knee), but I
don't think it's necessary to go back and prune all idioms out of a document.
Yoav
On May 31, 2012, at 4:49 AM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
Overall I continue to think that this is a helpful document, as were its
predecessors.
That said, I would assume that many potential readers of this document
are not native English speakers. Thus I suggest that the more colloquial
words and phrases might best be changed to more standard English.
Naturally one can quibble about particulars, but here are some examples
as I see them:
"get into the swing of things"
"give them a warm, fuzzy feeling"
"happenings"
"unsung heroes"
"home base"
"pet project"
"pet peeve"
"leaps and bounds"
"get technical"
"discussions of cosmic significance"
"gatherings of the tribes"
"kicks in"
"breath of fresh air"
"big-name"
"take the pluge"
I realize that such words and phrases lend a friendly tone to the
document, but IMHO that friendliness will be lost on non-native speakers.