Subject: Re: bug#12621: Emacs 24.1 crashing on Windows 7

From: Juanma Barranquero <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 01:43:28 +0100

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 1:04 AM, Stephen Berman <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I think it's not entirely implausible to regard "win32" as implicitly
> conveying the positive connotations of "win".

It is not entirely implausible. But, it is real?

I mean, someone reads a reference to Win32 or Win7 or WinXP in our
docs, do they take it as "a form or praise", or just goes
unregistered, the same way that "newspaper" is not usually reanalized
by native speakers as news+paper? (I'm not saying they are not aware
of news+paper, I'm suggesting that newspaper is lexicalized as a
single word/concept and its constituent parts are not usually
consciously anaylized on their own.)  I'd bet that most native
speakers, at least these who have ever heard of Windows and happen to
read our docs or our list will take win32 and win7 and winxp just as
lexicalized tags for Windows-related stuff and do not waste a second
on its supposed "form of praise" meaning.

As an aside: I often wonder how frequent is to use "X is a win" to
praise something. I'm sure some (perhaps most?) native speakers will
say that it is fairly common, and that it's a widely understood idiom,
and I don't doubt it. But from my entirely subjective POV, I don't
really encounter it that frequently; most uses of win I've read are of
the form "it's a win-win", or "it's a win for X", which seem to fill
an entirely different semantic function.

On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Stefan Monnier
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> It's very far from puerile, it is on the contrary based on an
> understanding of the power of choosing your words.

The power of choosing your words is a two-edged sword.

Also, please tell me that the repeated use of MS-DOG in the docs isn't puerile.

  J