= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
STL comments on Video Q&A with Singularity Institute Executive Director - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (122)
It is grating.
I graduated from the California Institute of Technology. Grammatically, that's the (State) Institute of (Stuff), and "institute" gets "the" in American English. (But, I graduated from Caltech - when contracted, the need for "the" disappears.)
Regional dialects differ - I don't know about "institute" specifically, but for a similar example, British/Canadian/etc. English says "hospital" where American English says "the hospital" (I noticed this one in Deus Ex Human Revolution, set in Detroit but developed by Eidos Montreal.) It's also not the case that contractions/acronyms always eliminate "the": consider working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and working for the FBI. (Insiders will sometimes say "FBI", "CIA", "NSA" without "the", but the general public always adds "the".)
Facebook is a synthesized word, giving them more freedom to develop conventions around it. Similarly, if you went by Singinst, then avoiding "the Singinst" would be perfectly reasonable.
Yes, it would never have occured to me that "the FBI" could be wrong.
There are a lot of these. On ten seconds' thought, I would complete "working for..." with: the FBI
the CIA
the NFL
the AMA
the ADA (which isn't an organization, but can still be an employer)
Using a definite article implies syntactically that the referent is uniquely referenced; it wouldn't surprise me if there was an implicit status claim there, and if the resulting status negotiation was contributing to the (IMHO otherwise entirely unjustified) heat with which this nomenclature issue is being discussed/voted on here.