Have to vs must
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Even professional writers make the same mistake: Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think[^]
I've got to be really careful, here, because even I'm not above Skitt's Law, but book titles are like headlines, so she's either anthropomorphising computers as an attention grabber, or to press the "smart device" aspect. Probably the former.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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These kinds of concern are important. But, they are highly language and culture dependent. For this discussion, we certainly must (/have to) treat British and American English as distinct languages. Even within the Norwegian language, native to about 5 mill people, you see large variations among dialects. The are cases of word pairs that swaps meanings from one dialect to the other ("brød" is "bread" in one dialect, "cake" in another, while "kake" is the other way around, same with "kirsebær" and "moreller" - which is the sweet cherry, which is the sour kind). Sometimes, a single word in one dialect takes a sentence to represent in other dialects: In Trøndelag, where I live now, I could ask if you know some person, and you might answer "Æ vætt'a 'n, ja", which says "I know who he is, but I have never have any personal contact with him". In my own south Norway dialect, there is no single term (literally: "I know of him") that expresses that kind of relationship. One of my language books has illustration of where different European languages (as determined by gallups from speakers of those languages) sets the limits between yellow and orange, red, green, blue, violet, ... The differences are surprisingly large, even within Europe (which you might think is reasonably homogenous from a cultural point of view). Another case study in the same book is personal relations: How close is a "friend"? A "buddy"? An "acquaintance"? The dictionary provides translations, but on closer inspection it turns out that, say, the Norwegian terms "venn", "kamerat" and "bekjent" cover significantly different sectors of the social scale than the Amerian terms. When I first visited the USA as a teenager, of course I was familiar with "girlfriend"s and "boyfriend"s, and was confused when my host family referred to my buddies as my boyfriends. When I asked, they explained that the boyfriend of a girl is quite different from a boyfriend of a boy. But, I asked, what do you then call it when two boys are sweethearts? That shocked my Catholic, Midwestern host family deeply. The reaction was like Russian: We do not have such perverts in our society! It wasn't phrased exactly that way, but the meaning was the same. So I learned not to take lightly on taking words from one cultural context to another.
No argument here. Things like the partial role reversal of "horrible" and "terrible" in English and US English are what I use to highlight the problem (English "I feel terrible" = US English "I feel horrible", but the nuance is wrong if you say them in the wrong place). Here, have some practice with perfect English[^]. The only major English/US English difference in the have to/need to/must phrases, though, is that US English tends to use "have got to" in place of "have to" more frequently, because US English has more of an emphasis on "got" being used for unwanted or negative things.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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would/could autocorrect not be set alter ss to ß for you? (I don't have DE language pack to test)
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
It does, but it shouldn't.
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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It gets worse in case you use this with "not" :laugh:
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
The interesting thing with 'not' is that in case of 'must', 'not' does not apply to 'must', but the thing it is referring to. E. g. in 'You must not do' the 'not' applies to 'do', not 'must' Whereas in case of 'have to', using 'not' results in a logical negation of 'have to': 'You don't have to' means the same as 'Its not true that you have to' Therefore you could say that in case you want to forbid something, you should always use 'must' and 'not', because 'have to' and 'not' doesn't express the same. Unless, of course, you choose to be precise on what to negate: 'You have to not do' would work syntactically and semantically. But I don't think I've ever seen or heard such a phrase in english. ;)
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Does changing your language to English (U.K.) not work? (Click on the language down on the status bar.)
That's what I thought, but when I checked the list of languages, there was only one selection for English - no English(UK) or similar. MSDN didn't indicate it exists either.
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Interesting examples. I and a couple of coworkers do support for our software (answering email when we have time and such). I'm not a native English speaker; my coworkers are, but I always go out of my way in my responses to customers to discuss "the problem", whereas my coworkers might use "your problem". I've always thought "your problem" had a rather strong undertone suggesting a customer was having problems because of his own doing...whereas "the problem" is more neutral. I've mentioned it to my coworkers, but they don't see it that way at all. I'm concluded maybe it's just me and my French background (in French, "ton probleme" is very informal and infers "you're the only one seeing that"), but I still avoid using "your problem" in correspondence with customers...
Good point. As a german I'd see it the same as you do. 'Your' implies that it's not the same for 'me'. Moreover, when a client reports a problem, and they have a maintenance contract, then it becomes 'our problem' too! That said, assuming you're talking about your software, it may suffer from many problems, so you still might want to say 'your problem' in order to clarify that you're talking about the problem of the client, rather than your problem to get all those bugs fixed, or whatever ;)
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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The interesting thing with 'not' is that in case of 'must', 'not' does not apply to 'must', but the thing it is referring to. E. g. in 'You must not do' the 'not' applies to 'do', not 'must' Whereas in case of 'have to', using 'not' results in a logical negation of 'have to': 'You don't have to' means the same as 'Its not true that you have to' Therefore you could say that in case you want to forbid something, you should always use 'must' and 'not', because 'have to' and 'not' doesn't express the same. Unless, of course, you choose to be precise on what to negate: 'You have to not do' would work syntactically and semantically. But I don't think I've ever seen or heard such a phrase in english. ;)
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
In Norwegian, it depends on where you put the stress: You must not do it ("Du må ikke gjøre det") vs. You must not do it ("Du må ikke gjøre det") - I guess the difference in meaning is approximately the same in English as in Norwegian. In writing, highlighting with italics, underlining or boldface may, for a variety of reasons be undesirable, so you may be missing a way to indicate your intetion. We have other cases similar to your example. You need not do it ("Du trenger ikke gjøre det") would never be considered a negation of "do it", but of "need" (so it behaves differently from "must"). Moving on to "can", you can have a whole series of meanings depending on the stress, and the "not" ("Du kan [ikke] gjøre det"): You can climb that wall. (maybe the others can't) You can climb that wall (if you just do your best) You can climb that wall (wow! I didn't know that) You can not climb that wall (you are not old enough) You can not climb that wall (stop pretending that you can) You can not climb that wall (I do not allow you to do it) You can not climb that wall (that would be just crazy) and so on. (Depending on context, the interpretation may be somewhat different.) I have met immigrants who have learned to speak Norwegian almost completely free of accent, but they reveal themselves as non-native speakers by not mastering the meaning of all stress patterns, or by the word order: Two alternatives may both be valid, but with somewhat different meanings, often when "not" is involved: I am not planning to go to London, vs. I am planning not to go to London. I heard Vera Henriksen, author of Viking age novels and prominent translator of old Norse litterature to modern Norwegian, talk about the problems of translating the poetry: The Norse language (like modern German) made use of seveal cases, i.e. inflected forms to indicate e.g. the role of an actor. We have got a few traces of it left: He hit him, or Him he hit. In the Norse poetry, you have great freedom in the word order, and the poetic rythm depends on it. But in a direct translation to modern Norwegian, the same word order is illegal, meaningless or has a different meaning. If you reorder it according to modern grammatical rules, the rythm is completely ruined. It takes a skilled author to do an honest translation, rather than to re-invent the text!
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Well, tell your cow-orkers that an expert has said that they have to say it your way. I'd be horrified to see support messages insultingly talking of "your problem" to customers, as if it were their fault.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
I was working in a team where one guy was born of a scottish mother (but he had grown up in Norway), and one Norwegian lady who had for thirty years been working as a top level secretary of international French companies with a high reputation. The American in the team once remarked to me that you could easily hear that Ellen is not a native English speaker: She speaks (/writes) perfect English! Robert, a (semi-)native English speaker, makes those small slips and grammatical errors "natural" for a native speaker. Not perfect, the way Ellen spoke. Then, for the question of what is "perfect": The team with Robert and Ellen also included an English lady, the American lady and an Australian guy - all grown up with English as their primary language. I was going to give a presentation in English, and was unsure about my choice of preposition in one of the slides, so I asked the English lady. No, no - that is not the right one, you must write ...". The Australian overheard that, but didn't accept Linda's correction, he made a different suggestion. That made the American lady stand up: Don't listen to Linda or Alex, it should be ... (unfortunately, I can't remember the different proposals). The three went into a verbal dogfight, all of insisting that the other two proposals were just wrong. The only thing they could agree on is that my first suggestion coudn't be used. I just let them fight (neither of them ever gave in), but silently selected the proposal from the English lady, as the company at that time officially did their documentation in British English.
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I'm writing some stuff in Word and Word thinks it's necessary to improve my writing. Mostly, that's true, but it has one suggestion that I followed until I found out it's not right. Every time I write "have to" or some form of it, Word says "use 'must' for concise language." Now, as I understand it, that's perfectly fine in American English, but not so much in British English where "have to" indicates an external incentive while "must" comes from an internal incentive. For example, "I have to use the Azure cloud at work" (dictated by your boss) and "I must work out more often" (something you wish to do because it's healthy). Of course, if your doctor or wife tells you to work out more often "or else" it becomes "I have to work out more often." Anyway, I must now change "must" to "have to" or my readers will make fun of me for not understanding the English language :sigh: The issue is pretty much un-Googleable, but does anyone know how I can turn off this very specific "have to" to "must" rule?
Best, Sander sanderrossel.com Migrating Applications to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly
I admit that I haven't read through all of the replies so if someone else has made the same comment as I am about to make, then I apologise. Look at almost any of the RFC for the Internet standards (sorry, memory has gone it's something like IETF). They start with a section about the use of words like SHOULD, CAN and MUST. It is a good staring point. Re your samples
"I have to use the Azure cloud at work"
, I agree; but for
"I must work out more often"
I'd have suggested
"I ought to work out more often"
or
"I should work out more often"
to indicate that it is something that the general consensus is that there is pressure on you to do it but you can refuse.
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I was working in a team where one guy was born of a scottish mother (but he had grown up in Norway), and one Norwegian lady who had for thirty years been working as a top level secretary of international French companies with a high reputation. The American in the team once remarked to me that you could easily hear that Ellen is not a native English speaker: She speaks (/writes) perfect English! Robert, a (semi-)native English speaker, makes those small slips and grammatical errors "natural" for a native speaker. Not perfect, the way Ellen spoke. Then, for the question of what is "perfect": The team with Robert and Ellen also included an English lady, the American lady and an Australian guy - all grown up with English as their primary language. I was going to give a presentation in English, and was unsure about my choice of preposition in one of the slides, so I asked the English lady. No, no - that is not the right one, you must write ...". The Australian overheard that, but didn't accept Linda's correction, he made a different suggestion. That made the American lady stand up: Don't listen to Linda or Alex, it should be ... (unfortunately, I can't remember the different proposals). The three went into a verbal dogfight, all of insisting that the other two proposals were just wrong. The only thing they could agree on is that my first suggestion coudn't be used. I just let them fight (neither of them ever gave in), but silently selected the proposal from the English lady, as the company at that time officially did their documentation in British English.
So pretty much a normal day, then. :laugh:
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
-
In Norwegian, it depends on where you put the stress: You must not do it ("Du må ikke gjøre det") vs. You must not do it ("Du må ikke gjøre det") - I guess the difference in meaning is approximately the same in English as in Norwegian. In writing, highlighting with italics, underlining or boldface may, for a variety of reasons be undesirable, so you may be missing a way to indicate your intetion. We have other cases similar to your example. You need not do it ("Du trenger ikke gjøre det") would never be considered a negation of "do it", but of "need" (so it behaves differently from "must"). Moving on to "can", you can have a whole series of meanings depending on the stress, and the "not" ("Du kan [ikke] gjøre det"): You can climb that wall. (maybe the others can't) You can climb that wall (if you just do your best) You can climb that wall (wow! I didn't know that) You can not climb that wall (you are not old enough) You can not climb that wall (stop pretending that you can) You can not climb that wall (I do not allow you to do it) You can not climb that wall (that would be just crazy) and so on. (Depending on context, the interpretation may be somewhat different.) I have met immigrants who have learned to speak Norwegian almost completely free of accent, but they reveal themselves as non-native speakers by not mastering the meaning of all stress patterns, or by the word order: Two alternatives may both be valid, but with somewhat different meanings, often when "not" is involved: I am not planning to go to London, vs. I am planning not to go to London. I heard Vera Henriksen, author of Viking age novels and prominent translator of old Norse litterature to modern Norwegian, talk about the problems of translating the poetry: The Norse language (like modern German) made use of seveal cases, i.e. inflected forms to indicate e.g. the role of an actor. We have got a few traces of it left: He hit him, or Him he hit. In the Norse poetry, you have great freedom in the word order, and the poetic rythm depends on it. But in a direct translation to modern Norwegian, the same word order is illegal, meaningless or has a different meaning. If you reorder it according to modern grammatical rules, the rythm is completely ruined. It takes a skilled author to do an honest translation, rather than to re-invent the text!
Great example. But you shouldn't forget: You can not climb that wall (maybe another one?) :-D At least, sometimes interpunctuation comes to the rescue when you need to resolve an ambiguity: "Let's eat, grandpa" is fine, but "Let's eat grandpa" is cannibalistic :omg:
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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That's what I thought, but when I checked the list of languages, there was only one selection for English - no English(UK) or similar. MSDN didn't indicate it exists either.
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Great example. But you shouldn't forget: You can not climb that wall (maybe another one?) :-D At least, sometimes interpunctuation comes to the rescue when you need to resolve an ambiguity: "Let's eat, grandpa" is fine, but "Let's eat grandpa" is cannibalistic :omg:
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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I admit that I haven't read through all of the replies so if someone else has made the same comment as I am about to make, then I apologise. Look at almost any of the RFC for the Internet standards (sorry, memory has gone it's something like IETF). They start with a section about the use of words like SHOULD, CAN and MUST. It is a good staring point. Re your samples
"I have to use the Azure cloud at work"
, I agree; but for
"I must work out more often"
I'd have suggested
"I ought to work out more often"
or
"I should work out more often"
to indicate that it is something that the general consensus is that there is pressure on you to do it but you can refuse.
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Ah, found 'em! I must have looked in the wrong place. Only 16 kinds here, but it's Office 2013. :doh: I've also found Swiss German, and that appears to be solving my problem with that unwanted autocorrection using ß. :thumbsup:
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Ah, found 'em! I must have looked in the wrong place. Only 16 kinds here, but it's Office 2013. :doh: I've also found Swiss German, and that appears to be solving my problem with that unwanted autocorrection using ß. :thumbsup:
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
Stefan_Lang wrote:
Only 16 kinds here, but it's Office 2013.
Stefan_Lang wrote:
I've also found Swiss German, and that appears to be solving my problem with that unwanted autocorrection using ß.
Well... it took only 7 years (at least) to find out and solve your problem :-D I really whish you don't have to look for "grammar" options in Intellisense :laugh: :laugh:
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Well, tell your cow-orkers that an expert has said that they have to say it your way. I'd be horrified to see support messages insultingly talking of "your problem" to customers, as if it were their fault.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
"The problem", "the issue", "what you're seeing"...I'm always willing, in my correspondence with customers, to shift the problem on us rather than something they're doing, even if nobody else has reported anything wrong. "Your problem" just *so* obviously sounds condescending to me.
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"The problem", "the issue", "what you're seeing"...I'm always willing, in my correspondence with customers, to shift the problem on us rather than something they're doing, even if nobody else has reported anything wrong. "Your problem" just *so* obviously sounds condescending to me.
Exactly. Never forget that they're paying good money for service, so they should get good -- and, at very least, polite -- service.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I'm writing some stuff in Word and Word thinks it's necessary to improve my writing. Mostly, that's true, but it has one suggestion that I followed until I found out it's not right. Every time I write "have to" or some form of it, Word says "use 'must' for concise language." Now, as I understand it, that's perfectly fine in American English, but not so much in British English where "have to" indicates an external incentive while "must" comes from an internal incentive. For example, "I have to use the Azure cloud at work" (dictated by your boss) and "I must work out more often" (something you wish to do because it's healthy). Of course, if your doctor or wife tells you to work out more often "or else" it becomes "I have to work out more often." Anyway, I must now change "must" to "have to" or my readers will make fun of me for not understanding the English language :sigh: The issue is pretty much un-Googleable, but does anyone know how I can turn off this very specific "have to" to "must" rule?
Best, Sander sanderrossel.com Migrating Applications to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly
I have Word Professional Plus 2016. I don't know if these instructions will be similar or not for your version. To use English (United Kingdom) instead of English (United States) 1) Open Word. 2) Click on File tab. 3) Select Options (bottom option on left menu bar). 4) Select Language (left menu bar). 5) Use drop-down list to "add additional editing language" and select "English (United Kingdom)". 6) Click Add. 7) In the Choose Editing Languages group, select English (United States). 8) Click Remove. 9) Click OK to exit. To stop having only this particular rule checked: 1) I can't find it. 2) Just turn off grammar checking instead :) Bond Keep all things a simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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There is a reason why these terms are explicitly defined (in its own RFC, if my memory is right): The terms can be understood in different ways, but in this context, this RFC, they have this meaning: ... Sort of a "YMMV" declaration.
