Can the three-syllable, two-word, pretentious Bureauspeak "prior to" please be eliminated from all tz-file comments and documentation (unless it's a quote) and universally replaced by the two-syllable, one-word "before" of identical meaning? _______________ Alex LIVINGSTON Macintosh Support Information Technology (IT) Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) The University of New South Wales (UNSW) [Sydney] NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA E-mail : alex@agsm.unsw.edu.au; cit@agsm.unsw.edu.au (IT) Facsimile: +61 2 9931-9349 Telephone: +61 2 9931-9264 Time : UTC + 10 (Sun. Mar. 25-31 - Sat. Oct. 24-30) or 11 hours
Can the three-syllable, two-word, pretentious Bureauspeak "prior to" please be eliminated from all tz-file comments and documentation (unless it's a quote) and universally replaced by the two-syllable, one-word "before" of identical me aning?
There is a shade of meaning difference between the two: in non-technical situations the term "before" can be used to mean "up to and including", whereas "prior to" never seems to accrete the "including" meaning. This is not to say that changing the term is necessarily a bad thing, just that care should be taken in the replacment that it remain clear that "before" is used in the strict sense. Sometimes a sentence may need reworking beyond the proposed substitution in order to avoid confusion on this point. --Ken Pizzini
Ken Pizzini wrote on 1998-01-13 11:54 UTC:
There is a shade of meaning difference between the two: in non-technical situations the term "before" can be used to mean "up to and including", whereas "prior to" never seems to accrete the "including" meaning.
There was in the first draft of ISO 8601:1998 an annex C that tried to standardize the precise technical meaning of such terms. However it seems that this annex has been removed from the current second draft <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/8601v03.pdf>. The terms (as originally proposed in some CEN Medical Informatics working group proposal) were: Reference time interval: ----------------> AT ----------------> BEFORE -------> AFTER -------> DURING -----> INCLUDES ----------------------------------------> CO-CONTINUES ---------------------------> CO-PRECEDES -----------------------------> CO-STARTS ----------> CO-ENDS -----------> (Make sure you use a monospaced font to display the above!) It seems that this CEN proposal is somewhat restricted and incomplete, but the discussion here suggests that it might nevertheless be a good idea to have such a specification for technical discussion about temporal structures. Better proposals? BTW: The above proposal contradicts your interpretation of "before". Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK email: mkuhn at acm.org, home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
participants (3)
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Alex LIVINGSTON -
Ken Pizzini -
Markus Kuhn