We’re way too deep in this hypothetical situation, but the reason that you perceive it to be difficult to sign up for an email list is because the tools you use have grown up around the broken system of feeds. If the world I described existed, your browser would make it as easy to subscribe to an email-based feed as an RSS/ATOM feed. It might even have support for making up the string I mentioned above or at the very least using the old-school + nomenclature that most mail systems support.

And even if browsers didn’t have such support, but the blog engines (et al) supported email based feeds, all you’d need to do is type in your email address into my blog engine… like you already did to be able to post comments here. :)

My forwarding email address = your single-use emails. My point is creating them is way more work that subscribing to an RSS feed.

To subscribe to an email list: I have to create a new browser tab, click through some bookmark folders to my host’s login, type my credentials, click through to the email manager, type in a new email address to use, switch back to the list form, paste in the email address in the form, wait for the list confirmation, click on the link for the list confirmation, go to my email program, and create a filter. ~40 clicks or key strokes.

To subscribe to an RSS feed: click the RSS icon in Firefox, click the Google Reader button, click the folder list, click the folder. 4 clicks.

My google apps account gets about 40k (no typo) spams per month. I really doubt anything I do could make that worse. :)

If subscribing to a mailing list was entering your address and clicking “go!” that’d be one ‘click’ :) Nothing stopping you from using single-use emails to see who is selling too. I do that for everything. When I signed up to see your jabber, the email I used was jabber at samrowe dot coo-coo-catchooooooo. No setup on my end other than saying “emails not destined for a specific account go to this inbox,” so I can make up addresses WILLY NILLY.

Subscribing to an RSS feed takes 4 clicks. Subscribing to an email list with a forwarding email address would take way more clicks and keystrokes. Just simpler to use the broken tech.
:)

The bigger problem is with sites like Google Reader hitting sites that have thousands of feeds (think Flickr). As I said in the post, were it email based, it would scale beautifully.

If the whole world was using email lists, why would you feel you have less control over those subscriptions than you do over feed subscriptions? Just as easy to turn off either tap in my mind.

Email is more push. Stuff comes at me without me having much control over the content I wish. RSS is more pull. I grab the content I wish and turn off the tap should I lose interest. As a user, I much prefer the pull approach.
:)

The site is crushed, but it’s worth the wait — the comic is extremely well done.

Safari never impressed me on the Mac in the short time I used one. However, I only used it to check the work people were doing on web pages skilled and WYSWIGers alike.

Google made where all this goes a bit interesting.

As usual, you’re so busy defending the status-quo that you’ve completely missed my point.

Your point seems to be: People in the past misused these words so much so that dictionaries (etc) changed because the misuse was so pervasive it became the norm.

Since you used a blockquote, I will too:

What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I’m semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing. ..he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance… Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen. And he’ll get all the great women.

My point, dude, is that we don’t have to be stupid. We can think critically about what we hear (I used an example of stupid auto-insurance ads) and what we say.

Now, sadly, I’ll talk about some of the points you made even though they don’t have really anything to do with the point I was trying to make. “Sadly” because these examples that I gave are examples of a lack of critical thinking, not because definitions change over time.

When someone says “I gave 110%” or “150%” or even “10,000%” (as I’ve heard) they’re not saying “I gave more than my usual effort.” You know this. If someone were to say “I gave 100%” they’d obviously be saying “I gave it all that I could give,” otherwise they’d simply say “I gave it my usual effort.”

When people say “I gave [over 100%]” they’re doing two things: firstly, they’re parroting what they’ve heard other people say and they’re not thinking about it at all [this is the real crux of my point] and secondly, they’re using a number larger than 100 as a form of exaggeration/intensification. It’s like repeating the word “really” and it sounds just as dumb.

As to what you think methodology is useful for, that’s a wholly different argument (and the one I think you were thinking I was giving). By opening words up to mean whatever the hell you want them to mean, you’ve eliminated the core function of language.

If you think “methodology” means “a sophisticated/nuanced method” while most other people think it just means “method” (which seems to be my experience with people misusing the word) then you’ve created a gap in language that makes it that much more difficult for you to communicate with others. Isn’t it difficult enough already?

You wouldn’t seriously suggest that just because people started doing it a long time ago, we should start using “utilize” instead of “use” (like a certain DBA and a certain project manager I know) do, would you? No, you wouldn’t because it’s silly and it makes them sound silly. I’m sure your books will say it’s acceptable, but just because something is acceptable doesn’t mean we should do it.

And as to “I could care less,” I can’t count the number of times I’ve corrected people only to have them argue with me only to then realize wtf they’re saying and say “wow I’ve always say that wrong.” Again, my point is that you should think about the things you hear and say and do. But if you want to have this other argument, I’ll say that, as above, having “could” be synonymous with “couldn’t” serves no purpose as far as I can see other than to defend the status-quo and say that it’s acceptable for people to be stupid parrots. Further, the anti-purpose that it serves is to make language lose even more meaning and make communication more difficult.

In the past when we’ve had this argument that is other than the one I was trying to make in my blog post, we get to this point in the argument and you say “but we’re not all speaking Old English!” And you’re right, of course, we’re not. I’m fine with language evolving. I don’t feel good about language devolving because stupid people misuse words.

While it’s almost certainly true that half or more of the words I’ve used in this response have had alternate or even opposing meanings in the past doesn’t mean that anyone who is living, educated and thinking won’t understand them. In other words, I can’t help when I was born. Were I able to help it, I might well chose to live in an older time. I know that of the books I read, the older they are, the more they’re able to say with fewer words. That’s probably because those words had, ya know, static meanings.