Proposal: May not
Reached quorum 5 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.
Adminned at 12 Sep 2011 02:05:19 UTC
I’ve been reading the Keywords section of the rules (Sunday afternoon) and in the keyword ‘May’ gives us some interesting consequences.
If you replace the definition of ‘may’ into a sentence with the phrase ‘may not’ then you do not get ‘is not permitted to’, but instead you get ‘is permitted to not’. This difference is important, as the example below illustrates:
“You are not permitted to eat my ice-cream.”
or
“You are permitted to not eat my ice-cream.”
Now what we want with the keyword is to get the above result. The bottom one is what we have currently. As courteous as the bottom one is, it won’t stop you eating the ice-cream.
I therefore propose that we add the following Keyword to the Appendix:
May not
“Is not permitted to”
I think this is the simplest solution. This argument does not apply to the Keyword ‘can’ because ‘cannot’ is a separate word, and technically is not defined by the keyword ‘can’.
Prince Anduril:
(Ely & Bateleur) - I get you, but common sense applies in CfJs where people get to vote and make a judgement. But I’d rather have it tied down.
(Kevan) - Actually, because the keyword definition is in quote marks, I think you could make a strong argument that we are just meant to replace instances of one with the other.