Technically words can have more than one meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb#Thumb_and_fingers

Colloquially, for many (most?) English speakers, the thumb is a finger:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=4+fingers%2C5+...

A strawberry is a berry. I don't care if biologists or botanists or whoever use a narrower technical definition in their research papers. The colloquial definition is just as valid. Prescriptivism-by-authority can take a hike. Yes, I will die on this hill.

https://imgur.com/gallery/pfEnXNT

Yes words can have any meaning at all. Also War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

Edit: this is a 1984 reference for those who aren’t familiar with that book or haven’t read it.

From your user page: "My name is actually CyberRabbit. I made a typo when I made this account and HN won’t let me edit my user name."

There is no user "CyberRabbit" by the way, maybe dang would rename your account if you ask him?

Yes he offered but I don’t use email and cannot contact him that way.

It's too late now anyway

That was actually pretty mean.

hehe.

I’m not sure which way your email joke is going. Is it poking fun at some HNers who go out of their way not to use common services or devices, or, are you joking that changing your username isn’t worth any effort?

Edit: oh. Likely a 1984 reference. Never mind now. Leaving comment as it is though

For reference, maybe calibration:

I parsed his profile line as a disambiguation.

Something like:

My handle is not cyber-"rabbi", so ignore the religious overtones.

I intended "rabbit" and did it wrong. The UI has this irritating quirk, but I'm not motivated to enough to really fix it.

Not that important.

I’m not sure why people in this thread keep thinking my comments are jokes. What is causing that? I literally do not use email.

It’s because of the two options I proposed. Both being HN-y things.

You sticking to your guns and not using cookies or JS shows me your principles are legit.

Normally and what my comment was referencing, are people who tout one abnormal or specific thing they do or don’t do. Like how awful FB or one of its properties are. While they happily go on every other data and privacy invading site/company.

A lot of what you're saying is hard to take seriously, because it's just plain bizarre. A complete refusal to use email for any purpose is pretty unusual to begin with, and even more so for a participant on a technical forum like this. Publicly complaining about the consequences of that decision is another layer of strange behavior. It seems like you're putting a lot of effort into not communicating effectively, so you really should expect people to have trouble taking your statements at face value.

> A complete refusal to use email for any purpose is pretty unusual to begin with

I don’t know if I would say I “refuse” to use email. I simply opt not to because I am privacy conscious. I also do not browse the web with cookies or JavaScript enabled. If that’s “bizarre” to you well then I guess I am a bizarre person but I deserve a bare minimum of respect just as all humans do.

> Publicly complaining about the consequences of that decision is another layer of strange behavior.

I literally never complained about anything. Someone else initiated a question at me about my communication with dang and I shared the results of that communication. I am not bothered at all by not being able to request a name change nor have I ever expressed resentment towards anyone for not being able to request a name change. My screen name is not very important to me. I feel like I am being unfairly judged here.

For what it's worth, I haven't watched TV since the 80's and people assume that I am militant or insane.

It is weird to not have watched any TV in decades. However the coworking community I run online funnily enough has some of the youngest members (early 20s) who do not get any references I make. They also seemingly watch no tv at all. Limited YouTube as well so not like that’s replacing it for them.

It hasn’t been a second thought of that being something to point out.

However I guess in an in person situation, it may come up more as a “thin”

I get the reference, but it seems like either a non-sequitur or a joke I'm not getting.

It’s not a non-sequitor nor a joke, the point is to highlight the danger of linguistic relativism. If we dismiss the idea that words must follow some standard meanings, things we value can be gradually shifted into weapons of oppression.

You're seriously overthinking this. Descriptivism isn't some plot to twist our cherished language, it just describes the language as it is currently used by speakers.

I believe there needs to be serious limits on the ability of “descriptivists” to condone divergent meanings of words. Within reason it is fine to describe new slightly expanded uses of words but wholesale accepting that word meanings can change arbitrarily in principle seems harmful to the maintenance of the integrity and quality of our language. For example, many people dislike HOAs but neighborhoods with HOAs maintain a certain level of quality, while neighborhoods without HOAs have quality levels across the board, including very bad.

And who decides what these standard meanings are?

It doesn’t matter who decides, it only matters that a decision has been made and that is it respected and enforced. Generally academics and/or intellectuals edit dictionaries

> Well, digits; a thumb is not technically a finger:)

Since you used the word "technically": actually the thumb is considered a finger in anatomical use (which is about as "technical" as you can get) just as the hallux (in popular jargon, "big toe") is anatomically considered a toe, despite having its own name.

In a prior life in pharmaceutical development we had a drug program in which this was specifically important.

What?! This is the first I hear of this, though you appear to be correct. Mindblowing.

Not only that--different species have used different parts for the thumb. A Jurassic pterodactyl ("wing-finger") had the earliest known opposable thumb. Pandas have their choice. Primates are late to the party, but might have a claim to most use. Some cats have joined.

The most important key-chord is space, followed by backspace.

Can't forget bats. There's a reason why their order is Chiroptera.

>The name "Chiroptera" derives from Ancient Greek: χείρ – cheir, "hand"[4] and πτερόν – pteron, "wing".[1][5]

Are you telling me that I have four fingers in English but five Finger in German?

I'm confused, but Collins dictionary agrees with you: "Your fingers are the four long thin parts at the end of each hand."

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/finger

One of those pointless little distinctions that English language makes but many other European languages don't.

Another example is "velocity" vs "speed"—what other vector quantity has two distinct names, one for the vector, another for the vector's magnitude? The acceleration doesn't, for example; and distance and displacement are two slightly different concepts that deserve two distinct names.

Weight and mass comes to mind.

Weight isn't the vector quantity of mass. It's mass times acceleration, e.g. gravitational acceleration, g. In other words, it's a force.

It's also one of the places where US units really break down. Working with pound-force, pound-mass, and slugs is really easy to mess up if you have to work that way. You're often better converting to SI, doing whatever calculations you have to do, and then converting back at the end.

Yeh, in general the term is just misused and confusing.

Whoa... That's heavy

#groan

That looks exactly right, we have five digits and four fingers, apparently. Who would have thought?

  > Are you telling me that I have four fingers in
  > English but five Finger in German?

In some languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, you have twenty. In these languages the colloquial word used for digit does not distinguish between digits on the hands and digits on the feet.

That is also true for Russian.

Though here is the definition from Merriam-Webster, which I'd consider the standard reference for US English.

any of the five terminating members of the hand : a digit of the forelimb especially : one other than the thumb

That seems more correct to me because I don't think in normal usage saying that "most people have 10 fingers and 10 toes" would be considered an inaccurate statement. And, if someone said they have four fingers on their right hand, you'd assume they meant they were missing a digit.

And even the Collins dictionary has a countable noun meaning with the usage example: "The fingers of a glove are the parts that a person's fingers fit into."

  > Though here is the definition from Merriam-Webster, which
  > I'd consider the standard reference for US English.

M-W considers itself a "descriptive" dictionary, not a "prescriptive" dictionary. That means that it will tell you what people who use words mean to say, but it will not tell you the actual meaning of the words. Therefore it is absolutely NOT a standard reference for English.

The nuance is sometimes important, M-W was the first dictionary to give "figuratively" as a definition for the word "literally" due to the way some people use the word "literally" online.

Much as I dislike literally==figuratively I'm not sure what descriptive vs. prescriptive has to do with standard reference. I'm somewhere between the poles. On the one hand see figuratively comment. On the other hand, languages are living things. And, to my example, if you tell me you have four fingers on one hand, I'll ask you how the accident happened.

I also think you'll find a lot more organizations that use MW as their reference standard than other US dictionaries.

Descriptive: Describes how people use the language.

Prescriptive: Describes how language should be used.

Descriptive dictionaries are highly favoured by those who like to effect change (I'm deliberately avoiding the word Liberal because I'm not in the US and I understand that word to be politically charged for many HN readers). Prescriptive dictionaries are more favoured by those who keep traditional values. Descriptive dictionaries can be used to say "I'm using the word correctly" and prescriptive dictionaries can be used to say "you're using the word incorrectly".

But organizations mostly want to talk to people in the language that they use. They have zero interest in being the language police. They may decide that their writers shouldn't use literally to mean figuratively. But, at least where I work, we're mostly interested in using the language that best connects to readers.

I believe that the real intention behind the statement is that not all users of their product are going to have 5 working fingers if they've had some sort of accident or similar.

That line of thinking doesn't get you far with anything. Nothing is universal. You can always find someone with some disability that prevents them from using a product.

Accommidating as many people as possible is good, but you can never accommidate everyone. Same goes for all of these "things programmers believe about X", be it names or whatever. You absolutely need to provide working product for majority of people first and majority of people have at least two names or in this case 5 fingers.

I wannnt to erase data stolen from my phone

And koalas have two on each paw, thumbs up to that.

Depends if you're a pianist or a violinist...