| bio | website | careers.stackoverflow.com/… |
|---|---|---|
| location | Helsinki, Finland | |
| age | 34 | |
| visits | member for | 2 years, 9 months |
| seen | 18 hours ago | |
| stats | profile views | 157 |
I'm a second-language speaker of what I believe is a fairly "neutral" flavour of English (if such a thing exists), mainly influenced by British and American varieties. I tend to prefer British spellings but I'm afraid I sound more American when I talk. :-)
I take an interest in languages, their evolution and history, and all those subtle variations between different dialects and registers. After secondary school I was actually close to going to study English Philology at university, but ended up taking Computer Science instead. Now I am a software developer by profession, and languages remain mainly a hobby for me. (Not only a hobby, as I think good prose writing skills are important in my field. For the last 7 years or so English has been the main written language I've used at work.)
Besides English and my native Finnish, I'm nowadays quite adept at Spanish too (it's my favourite language in a way, especially if spoken with a Cuban accent and when drunk). My Swedish and German are rusty, but re-learnable if need arises.
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Nov 22 |
comment |
“Favorite” vs. “favourite” +1. For further reading, see American and British English spelling differences on Wikipedia. |
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Nov 22 |
comment |
What words are commonly mispronounced by literate people who read them before they heard them? Oh, and check out this too; a nice Youtube clip with Linus saying both his name and Linux. |
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Nov 22 |
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What words are commonly mispronounced by literate people who read them before they heard them? As a reference, here's the classic linux.au clip: "I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux as /ˈlɪnəks/." |
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Nov 22 |
revised |
Which is the correct spelling: “grey” or “gray”? edited tags |
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Nov 21 |
comment |
Shorter way to say “split [user story] into tasks” @res, @RegDwight, what do you think about "Let's task it out", as suggested by Ted Ballou? (Is having "out" in the phrase sufficient to remove confusion with the other meaning of "task" as a verb?) |
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Nov 21 |
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Shorter way to say “split [user story] into tasks” Hmm, then again, in scrum, the team is collectively responsible for getting the whole user story done, whatever it takes (the team can basically self-organise in any way to that end). So there doesn't have to be one responsible person for each task. (Often there is, but "ownership" of individual tasks is not of central importance in any case.) But this gets quite off-topic here. :-) |
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Nov 21 |
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Shorter way to say “split [user story] into tasks” Thanks, nice to know that also native speakers might use "task (out)" as a verb with this meaning. |
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Nov 19 |
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Shorter way to say “split [user story] into tasks” I guess you're right, this is a more idiomatic way to say it (I've never been in a scrum team with native English speakers, so I don't know what they'd use.) As with RegDwight's comment, it might take me some time to get used to writing e.g. "US-12: Planning; Breaking it down". I'll try and see. :) |
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Nov 19 |
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Shorter way to say “split [user story] into tasks” @RegDwight: Good point! Usually that wouldn't be ambiguous (yeah, you can only split them into tasks). But having the work "task" somewhere in the phrase would be nice, if e.g. filling a short work hour report with something like "US-12: Planning; Splitting". Or hmm, maybe it's just a matter of getting used to. :) |
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Nov 19 |
asked | Shorter way to say “split [user story] into tasks” |
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Nov 2 |
revised |
Independance or Independence? edited tags |
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Oct 28 |
awarded | Nice Answer |
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Oct 25 |
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Using “disable” as a noun Thanks. "Idle time" doesn't fit my particular case though. (But it got me thinking about alternative ways to put it; I might go with "bypass time", as it's about disabling a kind of blocking feature.) |
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Oct 25 |
asked | Using “disable” as a noun |
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Oct 23 |
revised |
Henry Adam's use of punctuation, “:—” edited title |
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Oct 19 |
awarded | Suffrage |
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Oct 18 |
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What is the plural form of “Software”? Agreed, it is uncountable and "softwares" sounds very wrong. |
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Oct 18 |
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What is the plural form of “Software”? Other options: software solutions, applications, programs. |
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Oct 13 |
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Referring to objects as “she” Sure, that's what I meant. (That still looks a bit odd to me.) |
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Oct 10 |
awarded | Civic Duty |