Re: [PATCH] NET: fix wrong English expression in comments

From: Alan Cox
Date: Tue Jan 13 2009 - 04:06:09 EST


> "Don't add nothing," is not a colloquialism; it's just bad grammar. The

It's a matter of dialect. For historical reasons English emerged from a
mix of languages and cultures (even within the UK). In some of the
originating languages and areas a double negative is emphatic in others
it negates the negation. Thus it is a bad idea when using globally - as
nobody is quite sure what you mean.

> As with spelling errors, corrections of this sort of thing are trivial
> and a waste of time. I'm opposed to patches like that; they add no
> value and could be said to remove "character"; if that's important.

You may be so opposed, but they can be very problematic to non-English
speakers trying to use a dictionary or to understand if they are seeing a
typo or an unknown word: thus we do fix them. This is why we have the
trivial patch maintainer for such small fixes.

TRIVIAL PATCHES
P: Jiri Kosina
M: trivial@xxxxxxxxxx
L: linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
T: git kernel.org:/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial.git
S: Maintained
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