[Corpora-List] Community-driven corpus building

[Trevor Jenkins]

Hi Ramesh,

> > 1. "I mung headers.... I know that as a result of my munging any
> > mesasge I write will go to the list (and only to the list). And then I
> > *only* have to consider the few instances where I would need to reply
> > off list."
>
> I tried to find the meaning of 'mung'via google - 'mash until no good' =
> destroy? So I can't understand your use of it. If you destroy headers,
> how does that ensure you only reply to the list?

For some email consultants munging is considered bad. Chip Rosenthal wrote
an essay entitled ``Munging Headers Considered Harmful'' (*) there is a
copy at http://marc.merlins.org/netrants/reply-to-harmful.html (or so
Google tells me).

I happen to disagree vehemently with Rosenthal and his ilk. Setting
Reply-To: to be the list is the only proper way to setup up a mailing
list. If the owners won't do then I do with a procmail recipe.

(*) This is an in-joke for computing scientists relating back to Edsger
Dijkstra's (in)famous March 1968 letter to Comm of the ACM entitled ``GOTO
Considered Harmful''.

> > 2. "Except that you have actually donated your on-list replies to a
> > collection that is not under the control of the list owners. It can be
> > scrapped by anyone with a mind to. This list (and many others) is
> > being mirrored on gmane.org."

Interesting that when I searched for ``mung headers'' to find the
Rosenthal paper the first thing that Google found was my post to CORPORA-L
scraped to gmane.org.

> What does 'scrapped' mean in this context?

You're asking a dyslexic what a spelling means. ;-) Ah Google's
define: tells me it should be ``scraped''.

Ironic isn't it that a dyslexic is passionate about corpus studies. And a
dyslexic who used to work on the world's best text retrieval system (Trip
originally from paralog). ;-)

> > 3. By the way, I have long been intrigued by your strapline (if that's
> > the appropriate term):
>
> "<>< Re: deemed!"

Interestingly in the 20+ years I've been emailing, you (Ramesh) are only
the fourth or fifth person ever to comment. And of them only the
second/third to ask what it means. Two replied ``me too.'' ;-)

Two parts: <>< is an ASCII art representation of the 1st century symbol
ICTHUS used within the Christian church to identify themselves to other
believers. One wonders what a corpus of ASCII art would look like and how
would it be analysed?

``Re: deemed!'' is a pun on the word redeemed. Also makes for an
interesting question of corpus analysis.

Regards, Trevor

<>< Re: deemed!



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