Re: [PATCH 02/10] Docs: git tag: peoples back -> people's backs

From: Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 29, 2011, 02:02 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTinNb+GxEFDs_+KQvRyt4N=WrDmncUnbaCqAnAqM@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4D90CD1B.4030906@nextest.com>

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 13:02, Eric Raible <raible@nextest.com> wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> On 11:59 AM, Michael Witten wrote:
>> Signed-off-by: Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com>
>> ---
>>  Documentation/git-tag.txt |    2 +-
>>  1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/Documentation/git-tag.txt b/Documentation/git-tag.txt
>> index 7844ff1..e276393 100644
>> --- a/Documentation/git-tag.txt
>> +++ b/Documentation/git-tag.txt
>> @@ -169,7 +169,7 @@ Sorry for the inconvenience.
>>  ------------
>>
>>  Does this seem a bit complicated?  It *should* be. There is no
>> -way that it would be correct to just "fix" it behind peoples
>> +way that it would be correct to just "fix" it behind people's
>>  backs. People need to know that their tags might have been
>>  changed.
>
> s/people's/peoples'/

Actually, "people" is already plural, and thus "people's" is the correct possessive form (as with "women" and "women's"); "peoples", on the other hand, means diffent groups of people. For instance:

  There are many people in China.

  Each of the various peoples in China has
  its own language; Hokkien is the language
  of my particular people.

At least that's how I know the usage.

How about changing it to "behind a person's back"? Perhaps the whole informal tone is what needs to be changed.

> Or probably even better:
>
> /behind people's backs/automatically/

I don't feel that the word "automatically" sufficiently conveys the unexpected nature of such an event.