I recently saw a tweet where someone pointed out that "today morning" was an Indian phrase.
I had to really think hard why it is incorrect / not common elsewhere. Had to see comments to learn -- someone explained that a native English speaker would instead say "this morning" and not "today morning".
As a Indian ESL speaker -- "today morning" sounded (and still sounds) perfectly fine to me -- since my brain grew up with indian languages where this literal phrase (equivalent of "TODAY morning") is not only very common, but also the normal/correct way to convey the idea, and if we instead try to say "THIS morning" it would feel pretty contrived.
Not exactly a stylistic difference but there are real differences in the dialects. Here's example from many moons ago: "Even I think that's a bad idea." That was an Indian colleague. It took me weeks to figure out that he was using "even" in place of "also."
In a like vein when Australians say "goodeye" they usually aren't talking about your vision.
Or perhaps it was meant to specify that they, themselves, might have been presumed to be an outlier who would think it was a good idea, but who has in fact come to think that is a bad idea.
Examples of this kind of counter-presumptive use of the word "even":
1: On animals and the weather: "It was so cold that even polar bears were suffering from frostbite and frozen digits."
2: On politics, where one's general stance is well-known and who who might be rationally presumed to be a supporter of a particular thing: "Even I think that this issue is a total non-starter."
Even if they may have meant something else, that doesn't mean that they didn't intend for the words to be taken non-literally.
In this case it was indeed "also." I've heard it used that way many times.
Another common phrase in Indian English is "do the needful," which is a delightful formulation. Grammarly has a plausible description of how it arose. [0]
> What are some stylistic patterns that are different when something is written by a US author v/s Indian?
Largely as @brk above you already mentioned, tendency to use formal and obscure words alongside a specific tone. I'll also re-iterate what @brk said, hard to fully describe, more of a "you know it when you see it".
If I had to pick some specific examples from the blog post, the following phrase is a good example:
We systematically advanced through each tier, commencing from tier 5 and descending to tier 0.
There are 101 ways you could write that in US English, but I reckon 99% of the US population would be unlikely to pick the above unless they were writing an academic paper or something.
This one is also quite Indian English in many respects:
Our automated alerts and monitoring system actively oversees the process to ensure a seamless transition and promptly alerts of any issues that may arise.
Similarly, we have stylistic elements such as the over-breaking of paragraphs to the extent it becomes a series of statements. For example:
Upgrading to MySQL 8.0 brought not only new features, but also some unexpected tweaks in query execution plans for certain clusters. This resulted in increased latencies and resource consumption, potentially impacting user experience. This happened for the cluster which powers all the dashboards running at Uber. To address this issue, we collaborated with Percona, identified a patch fix, and successfully implemented it for the affected clusters. The resolution ensured the restoration of optimized query performance and resource efficiency in alignment with the upgraded MySQL version.
A relatively short paragraph, but five phrases. Your average US English writer would likely word it differently resulting in it being trimmed down to two or three phrases.
As I said in my original post though, none of it is bad English, its just a different style.
It’s been shocking to me how much Material Design has been worshipped in the design community and nobody has dared to pick out even the basic flaws in the design system, not even asking to go as far as saying that plain ‘boxes’ do not represent any ‘material’ and drop shadows are outdated.
Here's a 2019 Google blog post about Google's user studies to redesign their Material Design text field. They ran three separate studies testing over 140 combinations of 7 text field characteristics with 600 participants. The end result is better but they basically just discovered that users couldn't identify text fields that had only subtle visual affordances (like a light gray underline instead of a black rectangle). The exercise reminded me of the Google designer story about testing "63 shades of blue links".
Agree. When I commented how Material Design was so bad when it came out, many got offended. So I thought it must be a subjective personal thing. Now it's relief knowing I'm not the only one who think it's bad and full of UX anti-patterns. Flat design should be a thing of the past. It's unintutive e.g. hyperlink and button can be indistinguishable, no clear navigation UI. If any company should lead industry with a design framework, it should be Apple.
Yeah during the whole read I was like, why the fk do I care? This is your opinion, go enjoy FreeBSD if that's something you like. There are no objective arguments there.
Also claims never used the Dock once, I highly doubt that. Or maybe that's why he didn't like the OS.
