Jonik

2,824 reputation

1429

bio	website	careers.stackoverflow.com/…
	location	Helsinki, Finland
	age	34
visits	member for	2 years, 9 months
	seen	May 12 at 17:46
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.

	2,824 reputation	bio	website	careers.stackoverflow.com/…	visits	member for	2 years, 9 months
1429 badges		location	Helsinki, Finland		seen	May 12 at 17:46

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Jun 12	comment	Is saying “an obsolete remnant” redundant? Thanks, "cruft" is useful. In this particular case, however, it wasn't really code — just a single JSP file that was essentially empty (but whose existence still caused a bug) — so, a countable noun would be preferred. "Relic", suggested by others, is close to what I was looking for.
Jun 12	comment	Is saying “an obsolete remnant” redundant? @RoaringFish: Yeah, "relic" is good. What lead me to think of "remnant" was the Finnish word jäänne, which actually better translates to "relic" or "remains" now that I looked it up.
Jun 12	comment	Is saying “an obsolete remnant” redundant? Thanks! (I sdded some context as a comment to the question.)
Jun 12	comment	Is saying “an obsolete remnant” redundant? Context whence the question arose: in a software project, a file that had been laying in version control for a year, originally added with some intention in mind, but actually serving no purpose whatsoever. What to call that file?
Jun 10	comment	Is “might could” a correct construct? @tchrist: Yes, that sounds about right, but I don't how see how it relates to my comment. Maybe you misread what I wrote. (I never used the phrase you object to.)
May 7	comment	Does this device to restrict access to roads have a generic name? Another, related name for them seems to be retractable traffic bollard.
Aug 17	comment	What does “ﬂy by the seat of one's pants” mean? Thanks! Couldn't decide which of the top answers to accept, so I chose the most upvoted one. Also, I posted a small additional point that helped me understand the phrase.
Aug 17	comment	What does “ﬂy by the seat of one's pants” mean? (Or alternatively: Stack Exchange, sadly, still largely revolves around software developers and their hobbies.)
Aug 17	comment	What does “ﬂy by the seat of one's pants” mean? The context whence the question arose may be computer-related, but the question itself certainly is not.
May 28	comment	Antithesis of “international” Ah, missed that one, sorry :)
May 28	comment	Antithesis of “international” +1. Another very common example: international and domestic flights
Feb 23	comment	Is the term “hack” more positive or more negative? Further reading on Wikipedia: Hacker definition controversy :)
Feb 21	comment	What word(s) describe a woman's voice as “sexy”? Yeah, my dictionary says "(of a voice or utterance) sounding low-pitched and slightly hoarse" – this doesn't sound particularly smooth or feminine
Feb 7	comment	What are some expressions that can be used to end an email? @jae: "Regards" indeed sounds fine, and respectful enough, to me. :-) "Best regards" was just an example (one that I've seen used a lot).
Jan 31	comment	What are some expressions that can be used to end an email? @ijw, good point; I tend to agree. I've seen "Br," used quite often though, at least among businessy types here in the Nordics.
Jan 17	comment	Shorter way to say “split [user story] into tasks” (Forgot to add this earlier...) Thanks; I've actually applied scrum since 2005, and have generally been happy with it. (It ain't a silver bullet, and one should probably combine it with XP practices, but the key ideas of scrum and kanban do make sense, in my experience.)
Jan 16	comment	Which variant of English should I use when my target audience is the world? Of course, British English is a very common term for the varieties used in the UK, and claiming that "English" would be a sufficient replacement is rather loaded with bias.
Jan 5	comment	What are some expressions that can be used to end an email? Then again, are those mostly company internal emails? When emailing a customer, or a person you don't know well, it may, depending on circumstances, be better to err on the side of using some complimentary close (e.g. "best regards", nothing more formal than that).
Dec 23	comment	Using had twice Possible dupe of What does “had had” mean? How does this differ from “had”?
Dec 4	comment	Is it true that the English have many words for hill? +1 for quoting Trask's book. I was vaguely reminded of that too when reading the question (or well, a very similar passage in his other book Language: The Basics).