Timeline for the use of parentheses to mean "I won't tell you this again"
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
27 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 25, 2012 at 1:18 | answer | added | Pete L. Clark | timeline score: 13 | |
| Jul 24, 2012 at 15:46 | vote | accept | James Propp | ||
| Jul 21, 2012 at 16:42 | comment | added | Arend Bayer | Is it really worth making a convention to be able to write "interval" instead of "bounded interval"? You should remember that most readers won't read your paper linearly, i.e. they may jump directly to section 3.14 since that's all they care about. Not being able to read section 3.14 without having read sections 1.1-3.13 is a BIG disservice to most readers. | |
| Jul 21, 2012 at 8:45 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | Slightly off-topic, but what do people think about "jointly convexity", as in the abstract and the body of pnas.org/content/108/18/7313.full ? | |
| Jul 21, 2012 at 2:29 | comment | added | Joel David Hamkins | Barry, thanks for the link! I had made it parallel because I had wanted to highlight only the hyphen difference (or actually en-dash). But I also admit that I don't really understand proper "ic" versus "ical" usage. | |
| Jul 21, 2012 at 1:15 | comment | added | Barry Cipra | @Joel, I noticed you (unconsciously?) changed David Feldman's "theoretical" to "theoretic." There is an interesting (to grammarians, if not mathematicians) discussion of ic's and ical's at english.stackexchange.com/questions/6581/… | |
| Jul 21, 2012 at 0:39 | comment | added | Lee Mosher | @Mariano: I am in complete agreement with you. When I read papers that have too many parentheses, I find that my eyebrows go "down" for every open parenthesis and back "up" for every closed parenthesis, and pretty soon my eyebrows are very tired. | |
| Jul 21, 2012 at 0:15 | comment | added | Joel David Hamkins | ...You, for example, should write of "number-theoretic statements" rather than "number theoretic statements", and this distinction is exactly what underlies your editor's comment. To understand it, look up the proper use of the hyphen in iterated adjectival phrases in the Chicago Manual of Style, which explains the difference between a red-bike factory and a red bike factory. It is perfectly logical. | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 23:56 | comment | added | Joel David Hamkins | David, I disagree. There are currently 141 detailed questions at english.stackexchange.com/… on the proper use of parentheses. These are people who think carefully about correct grammar. Mathematicians, in constrast, are often sloppy and inconsistent, or just plain wrong. | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 22:29 | comment | added | David Feldman | @Jim Conant Lack of editing propagates degenerate constructions and makes them widespread and ineradicable, e.g., my pet peeve, "impact" as a transitive verb. | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 22:29 | comment | added | David Feldman | @Barry Cipra Research-level mathematics makes distinctive demands on language that engender idiomatic usages. Garden-variety grammar mavens (say, at english.stackexchange.com) usually just don't get mathematics. I once had a professional editor try to change "number theoretical statements" to "theoretical statements about numbers." While questions like Jim's should never form the core of MO, there may exist no better forum then MO for getting them answered. | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 22:13 | comment | added | David Feldman | A shriek, "(bounded!)", says "reminder" and removes the possibility of the "inessential" interpretation at the cost merely of a single extra character. | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 21:14 | comment | added | Jim Conant | By the way, I've got my own pet peeve: mathoverflow.net/questions/70241/… | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 21:02 | comment | added | Jim Conant | I personally have never seen parentheses used to mean "this assumption will be implicit from now on," and it strikes me as imprecise usage. But I do understand your frustration at a fussy referee. On my first ever submitted paper the referee criticized several mathematical grammatical constructions because he personally didn't like them, despite their widespread usage. | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 20:28 | comment | added | Barry Cipra | In terms of whether the use has a name, there was a similar question (from a mathematical source, no less!) at english.stackexchange.com/questions/49809/… -- maybe that would be a good place to take the present question. | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 19:57 | answer | added | Francois Ziegler | timeline score: 13 | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 19:46 | comment | added | Vidit Nanda | The syntax of parentheses can get somewhat intricate in theorem statements. Consider situations involving duality, like "the pullback (pushforward) of f is injective (surjective) when f is open (closed)" which saves space but becomes extremely annoying to read. In general, instead of using (bounded) in the theorem, maybe it is preferable to declare at the top of the section "all spaces are assumed to be bounded henceforth unless explicitly stated otherwise". | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 19:29 | comment | added | Mariano Suárez-Álvarez | (FWIW, IMHO there are very, very few real reasons for parenthesis to be used, and whenever someone gives me a manuscript to proof read I systematically suggest all of them be removed...) | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 19:28 | comment | added | Joel David Hamkins | You'll likely get knowledgeable answers at english.stackexchange.com/… | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 19:26 | comment | added | paul garrett | I myself consider your usage legitimate and useful: reminder/emphasis of standing assumptions. Yet I am also aware that some readers are confused by this use, or are hostile to it. A different sort of negative feature, to my mind, is the visual grittiness of the parentheses, and the possible perceived insinutation that there are other implicit assumptions that are not being recalled, but which the paranoid reader will fret over. :) | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 19:25 | comment | added | Mariano Suárez-Álvarez | In short, be explicit, as explicit as you can without becoming painful: the seconds you save by not writing things out will be charged to your readers in terms of time and unease. | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 19:24 | comment | added | Andreas Blass | I agree with Trevor. The parentheses around "bounded" should indicate that the theorem is true without that word, probably because some earlier convention said that boundedness is always tacitly understood. The reason for including the redundant word in parentheses would usually be that the convention was stated so long ago that the reader might have forgotten it. | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 19:23 | comment | added | Mariano Suárez-Álvarez | Indeed, if you want to assume from some point onwards that your intervals will be bounded, say so explicitly. In your parethetical reminder, be explicit about the fact that you are reminding the reader, as in «(bounded, as per our conventions established in the introduction)», for otherwise you end up causing more problems than by not saying nothing: if the «(bounded)» shows up at a place where the convention is active, then the reader will wonder where exactly did it stop holding... and will have to start going back checking, &c. | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 19:19 | history | edited | James Propp | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 3 characters in body; Post Made Community Wiki
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| Jul 20, 2012 at 19:16 | comment | added | Trevor Wilson | It seems to me that these two uses of parentheses are not necessarily different. Ideally before you use parentheses to indicate "I won't tell you this again" you will say something like "all widgets are henceforth assumed to be bounded" and then when you write "(bounded) widget" it is an inessential reminder of this global assumption. | |
| Jul 20, 2012 at 19:12 | history | edited | Charles Staats |
added "writing" tag
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| Jul 20, 2012 at 19:04 | history | asked | James Propp | CC BY-SA 3.0 |