I used to live in Japan, and let me tell you, a lot of typical Japanese cooking is unexpectedly quite lightly seasoned. I don’t mean all food, but especially common things like rice and fish dishes.

It lets you taste the food itself more than the seasoning. If you start with good ingredients, you don’t need to dress it up as much.

I pronounce it the same as you, and by the way, that’s also the pronunciation listed on Wikipedia.

But I can’t remember how other people that I’ve worked with pronounce it. I’m sure it’s come up, but I just don’t recall.

I think the fact that its configuration file is called sudoers is fairly decisive that other pronunciations are wrong.

I think they’re downvoting my comments to try to be funny in this particular situation.

If people used the downvote like you suggest, it would be less of a problem. But speaking of policing, there is no real policing of votes. There’s just a button.

You give people a downvote button, and they’ll simply go through threads going up, down, up, down, up, down. It’s like they double their vote and it drowns out any more ethical downvotes. It hasn’t happened much on Lemmy, but it happens as a matter of course on Reddit. It will eventually be here, too, if Lemmy continues to grow. There is nothing to stop it.

Besides, apart from your point about essentially unmoderated areas, I think the upvote button is enough to achieve all the goals you listed. And if it’s unmoderated, it’s going to become unusably toxic no matter how people vote.

If it’s poorly made, then you’re supposed to simply upvote other comments if they’re better.

If a comment is unfitting, then it is off-topic and can be removed by mods.

I honestly think comment downvotes should be disallowed, or if that isn’t possible, then the users who downvote each comment should be easy to find, like with a “click to expand and list downvoters” sort of link. I think you’d find downvoters to be mostly trolls and non-participators. Low value accounts.

So, in my case, enum is programmer jargon and is not something that I’d pronounce at all to a layman or larger audience. I don’t think anybody has ever misunderstood me. I often also simply say “enumeration”. But again, that is still jargon. For a programmer, an enumeration is a data type, and for the layman, it probably just means something like “numbered things”.

Spoken language is too ephemeral to be imprecise or use your own flair

I would say that this is a good rule of thumb.

But then, how do I put this? I think people who are on the spectrum are much more concerned with misinterpretation than neurotypical people. I understand why, as I’ve struggled with being misinterpreted in the past. Being misinterpreted feels like a major disaster. But I noticed that other people basically assume that they’ll be understood, no matter how poorly their message is conveyed. I suspect that you’ve noticed the same thing. I don’t go that far, but I definitely think there is room for self-expression.

In the end, if you understand and feel comfortable with the normal rules, then you can understand where it’s okay to start to break them. Some estimates say that Shakespeare invented 1700 words in his written works. I’m sure that in the majority of those instances, he expected to be understood, despite using a word that nobody else had ever used.

Your fashion metaphor is actually a pretty good one, I think. There is room for expression, but there are also general guidelines to follow. In a typical office environment, nobody comes in to work nude or wearing a toilet seat around their neck. Okay that’s extreme, but nobody wears tons of jewelry like Mr. T, either. What I’m saying is that, outside of high fashion like you see on runways, people do follow a basic set of clothing rules, some of which are social and not specifically practical, and their self-expression is only built on top of that base.

The basic rules for clothing are to conceal certain areas, to provide comfort and protection. That sort of basic thing. So with that, everybody’s clothes serve that purpose. And then, like I said, there are some social rules. You know, like don’t wear a white dress to a wedding. When people violate those rules, other people notice and are often confused. And once the basic purpose of clothing is met, then there are areas for flair. I would say that the same thing applies to language.

What I have a hard time with is when they just call it “sequel server”. Obviously, I understand what they mean, but it seems so nonspecific.

Fortunately, although “rej-ecks” is common, so is the correct pronunciation.

As for “red-iss”, I think that may be a losing battle. Wikipedia even lists that as the correct pronunciation. I think the rules start to fall apart when it is a project name, and when it smooshes together multiple words.

Their story is more about the choice of words. In America, we typically call it a “line”. In England, it is typically called a “queue”.

I typically pronounce “char” as “character”. Honestly, I rarely have any reason to talk specifically about chars, so it doesn’t come up often.

The next logical question is, then, why don’t I pronounce “enum” as “enumeration”? And the answer is that I often do. But I do say it both long and short.

I knew somebody (not a programmer) who pronounced HTML as “hotmail”. I normally let people pronounce things however they want, but I had to beg her to pronounce it differently because I simply couldn’t deal with it pronounced like that.

I don’t personally do this, but many people in my family say the days of the week with “dee”. Like “Sundee”, “Mondee”. I think it’s charming, but one of their children said they were weird for saying it that way.

Also, as a programmer, there are some words that programmers use that are abbreviated which I refuse to pronounce the way that others pronounce them because I think it’s weird, but virtually everybody pronounces them different to me.

For example, there is a common keyword in programming languages called “enum”, and most people I know pronounce it as “EE-num”, like it rhymes with “ME dumb”. But “enum” is short for “enumeration”, so I pronounce it as if it’s the first two syllables of “enumeration”, like “ee-NUUM”. Although I think the normal pronunciation is weird, I don’t say anything to people. I just pronounce it the way that I think it should be pronounced. But on multiple occasions, other programmers have called me out for it and asked why I pronounce it “wrong”.

There are several other programming terms like this, but they don’t immediately come to mind. Enum is the most common example.

Speaking of downvotes, I don’t think comments in a moderated forum should even have a downvote button. Every situation where a comment can be legitimately downvoted, like spam or bigotry or trolling, the comment should just be reported and removed by a moderator, instead.

People’s intuition about downvoting is simply that it’s the opposite of an upvote because that’s how it is presented in the UI. That might make sense for articles, but not for comments.

Suspiciously similar to a trick parents use on their children. “Do you want to eat the peas first or the carrots first?” Gives them the illusion that they made a choice about what to eat.