I’m going to vote for this simply because ais’ re-reversion rather than raising a CfJ himself was such poor etiquette.

This should reject the Triumphs increase, rather than changing it in the opposite direction: currently there is an argument about whether the Triumphs are 7 or 8, and if a CFJ passes to reduce it by one there will then be an argument about whether the Triumphs are 6 or 7. (In other words, a CFJ should change the situation only from the hypothetical gamestate that you think is incorrect, not from both gamestates.)

The only problem with the sentence is that it uses the plural verb “credit” rather than singular verb “credits” when referring to an action performed by a singular subject. To me, this doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence at all. A comparable situation would be writing “an bounty” rather than “a bounty” – grammatically incorrect but the failure of grammatical agreement does not change the meaning of the sentence. In particular, it does not cause the sentence to become entirely meaningless.

Also likely in support of this, just for the sake of consistency (I don’t see a meaningful difference between graciously interpreting grammatical issues and graciously interpreting spelling issues, and we’ve already held that the latter isn’t something we’re doing during the folkowing CfJs)

@Josh: the reversion mentioned Gibberish which the rule clearly didn’t contain, so the reversion reason was clearly in error. I assumed that after being informed of the mistake, Brendan would agree that my action was legal, and thus there was no reason to call a CFJ. (Obviously, that assumption was wrong – Brendan apparently thinks there were two other grounds upon which my action was illegal. But they weren’t mentioned in the reversion reason, so I was unaware of there being any further controversy.)

In any case, with this current wording, the CFJ will (if you believe Brendan’s argument, which I don’t) set SingularByte’s Triumphs to 6 rather than 7. A pet hate of mine is people wording CFJs as though the values on the tracking page are correct, whilst simultaneously arguing that the values on the tracking page are incorrect.

@ais “Instead of repeatedly reverting and re-reverting a disputed alteration, however, Participants are encouraged to raise a Call for Judgement.”

@Habanero I see what you did, there.

Updated the text to suit your preferences, ais, although it’s clear you’re voting against regardless.

@Habanero: the difference is that (prior to the Gibberish rule being enacted) the use of a nonword in a sentence could be interpreted as a definition of the word, or as a dependency on a definition that would subsequently be added to the ruleset.

Meanwhile, a grammatical error doesn’t do that. Compare, say, “a hound” to “an hound” to “a yound”; the use of “yound” seems like it’s trying to access some context we don’t know about, whereas the first two are both formed of an article with the same meaning in each case + the same noun in each case, meaning that the meaning is the same – it’s just that a rule of grammar wasn’t followed.

As another example, consider a proposal “Add 1 Triumph to me and SingularByte”. Would you consider that meaningless? (The grammatically correct wording would be “Add 1 Triumph to SingularByte and me” – first-person pronouns come last. But this is a rule of grammar that not everyone has internalised and which shouldn’t make any difference to the meaning.)

@Josh: “Instead of repeatedly reverting and re-reverting a disputed alteration, however, Participants are encouraged to raise a Call for Judgement.” ← I’m aware (in fact I wrote that sentence) – but in this case I was unaware that there was a dispute, rather than a simple misreading of a rule.

Also worth noting: under the interpretation espoused by this CFJ, this dynasty never started – it would have been illegal to post a DoV in Clucky I due to its use of “a Olympian” in the DoV rule, making most actions subsequent to that point illegal.

I don’t think anyone would have considered the grammatical mistake to break the ruleset at the time, and it doesn’t in general make sense to consider it as breaking sentences – it isn’t like you’re introducing any new words that could potentially have a different meaning.

(Actually, that Clucky I ruleset also prevents, under the interpretation in this CFJ, unidling and registering – as such BlogNomic would be permanently stuck with no players, a state which would only be recoverable using a core rules scam.)

I don’t know if I agree with your “seems like” there. ‘Yound’ doesn’t seem to me to access a different context any more than ‘credit’ might be evoking some other made-up verb with an irregular conjugation. Both of these situations are equal in my eyes

It’s not that I’d consider either of the two meaningless; the take I think to be ‘most correct’ here is that in both the folkowing case and this case here we should graciously interpret what is a clear error when we look at the surrounding context. My vote for this is because (as you mentioned last time) in this particular dynasty the gameplay heavily revolves around the exact syntax and spelling of sentences and because I would like to hold consistent with what I see as a similar ruling earlier in the dynasty, even if I do not see it as the most correct ruling

I guess I forgot to clarify something earlier – my opinion is generally that we should try to extract as much meaning from the rules in question as possible, trying to work out the most viable possible interpretation of what is written.

In the case of “folkowing”, my position was that “folkowing” did mean something, and we should try to determine what – and eventually concluded that the rule in question was a definition of “folkowing” and therefore functioned correctly. In other words, my position was that the “folkowing” version of the rule did in fact have meaning. I voted for a revert to get the game into a known gamestate, but was under the belief that the “charactery” edit was illegal. (It is also the case that the scoring attempt that “charactery” was intended to block was also illegal, but that was caused by “folkowing” working correctly, not caused by “folkowing” not working.) My position was also that it was a distinct word from “following”, but the rule still functioned despite that.

In this case, we have to extract meaning from “a Mastermind credit”, which we can do by observing that these are three English words that each have a clear meaning in context, despite the grammar rules that normally prevent them being used in that combination – that’s the best way to extract as much meaning as possible from the rule, like we did from “folkowing”.

@Habanero: I had not considered the argument that the sentence might be trying to define “credit” as a new verb with an irregular conjugation; I’m not sure I agree with it, but it’s plausible. How many examples are there in English where a verb changes meaning due to being conjugated weirdly? The only one I can think of offhand is “hanged” versus “hung”.

ais, I think your argument is that verb conjugation and the choice of article in a sentence create exactly equivalent problems with the syntax of a sentence. I disagree, in part because a-vs-an is a complicated issue in English already, and in part because you’re comparing pronunciation to function. The latter is more important in a game that is entirely based on written language.

“An historic moment” and “a historic moment” mean the same thing. “The moose tramples” and “the moose trample” do not. Verb conjugation has a greater effect on syntactic validity than article ending, and that’s why this CfJ exists.

Now I’m wondering whether there are two different nouns that have the same spelling, but different pronunciations (one of which starts with a vowel sound and one of which starts with a consonant sound), thus the use of a/an helps disambiguate (like it does in the “moose” example).

I feel like the singular/plural issue possibly isn’t particularly important at BlogNomic because we normally know whether the the thing or things being referred to is/are singular or plural anyway (e.g. we still have lots of rules that refer to “the Mastermind” and use singular verbs because of that – interestingly, “Coregency” probably patches up those references, because it’s written as though it simulates a hypothetical singular Mastermind and then generalises, rather than just replacing the references, and I’m now wondering whether that was intentional to avoid bad-grammar-by-proxy).

In any case, I’m finding this discussion interesting – I had thought it was obvious, and although you haven’t convinced me to change my mind, you have convinced me that it isn’t as obvious as I thought.

OK, so there is one example where “a” versus “an” could theoretically disambiguate: “unionized” (the employment sense of this starts with a consonant sound, the chemistry sense with a vowel sound, and being an adjective it can be formed into a noun phrase).

However, the two words spelled “unionized” are so different in meaning that it’s hard to create a sentence where either meaning could make sense!

@Brendan: I don’t think you’ll have much basis for raising a second CfJ that the Bounty wasn’t actually satisfied. The rules (fixed or not) state that it’s up to each Mastermind to determine if the Bounty was satisfied or not. They are free to vote however they please.

The only way to actually require that the Bounty is unambiguously satisfied is to reword the Bounty rules such that the Masterminds are only allowed to vote FOR on the Bounty Notice if the Bounty was satisfied, like this:

If one or more enacted Votable Matters satisfy the demand of an Open Bounty Notice, a Mastermind may post a comment…

That above statement makes a requirement of the state, rather than a decision from a Mastermind.

  If we’re going to start demanding perfect grammar retroactively, there’s a whole lot of triumphs that are going to have to be revoked on the exact same basis.