Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hehbot 584 days ago
My good man, this is the internet. Grammar does not matter as long as you are understood.
3 comments

>Grammar does not matter

most people who learn/are learning a foreign language appreciate getting corrections and suggested improvements. People willing to take the time and analyze and share are a valuable resource.

Regardless if you're struggling with the language and could use the help, or just writing hastily, the correction is excessive and reads like an LLM response.
Not native speaker here. Corrections are soetimes helpful, but I prefer shorter corrections. Something like:

> "know": you should use "known" (adjetive) instead of "know" (verb).

And add more details in case the author or someone else ask for clarifications.

no, we don’t appreciate fixing small typos becoming the main point of discussion in a technical forum. It was completely understandable and sounded like someone not agreeing with the content but not capable of refuting it
My correction itself was an interpretation. The phrase was not fully intelligible to me even.
I would have thought:

> Well, some people are known for only doing their job when a manager is around. They behave similarly after all [to the monkeys].

Also, some days I wish there was a way to fix typos in restaurant menus.

Although I would still be flummoxed by "Pork Floss, Chinese Sausage Scorched Rice" (cơm cháy chà bông lạp xưởng)

I understood it (I think), basically they were saying some people only do their job when their manager is around hence the monkeys and people aren’t that different after all.

Hope this helps

Its the specificity that's important. The general vibe is easy to interpret for commonly understood phrases, but often language complexity allows for subtle nuances that may be difficult to interpret if they are not properly used.
Let’s break it down:

> some people is know

Some people are known

> for only do their job when a manager is around.

for only doing their job when a manager is around.

> They behave similar after all.

Their behavior is similar to the chimpanzees in the study.

Now, let’s put that all together:

> Some people are known for only doing their job when a manager is around. Their behavior is similar to the chimpanzees in the study.

That wasn’t so hard now, was it?

Edit: I see that the two sibling comments to mine interpreted it the same way.

No. Grammar does matter on the Internet. So does spelling. Malformed writing takes extra effort to decipher, so even if you're understood, you may also be secretly hated for it.