{"id":4299,"date":"2025-01-20T01:03:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-20T06:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=4299"},"modified":"2025-01-04T08:12:27","modified_gmt":"2025-01-04T13:12:27","slug":"facts-and-adjectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2025\/01\/facts-and-adjectives\/","title":{"rendered":"Facts and Adjectives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>We can&#8217;t have both facts and adjectives. Can we?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Facts are facts. It is 27\u00b0 F outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Adjectives are, well sort of fuzzy. It is cold outside. (Cold to whom? Cold compared to what?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;The fact is, they were aggressive.&#8221; Oops. &#8220;Aggressive&#8221; is an adjective. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;The fact is, he is tall.&#8221; Well, &#8220;tall&#8221; is an adjective, but 98.6% of the world considers someone who is seven feet tall to be, well, you know &#8220;tall.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Engineering specifications should be facts that are measurable and testable. Engineers should express the goals of a system with adjectives like, &#8220;happy users&#8221; and &#8220;easy to use.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Good grief; this is confusing. &#8220;Confusing&#8221; is an adjective. Good grief. I think &#8220;good grief&#8221; is all adjectives as well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This gives me a headache. Oops. Can&#8217;t measure a headache. Is a headache a fact or an adjective?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Why can&#8217;t this be simpler? (yet another adjective) This requires work and effort and caring to find facts and use adjectives when they are appropriate. This is our task. Let&#8217;s do better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips We can&#8217;t have both facts and adjectives. Can we? Facts are facts. It is 27\u00b0 F outside. Adjectives are, well sort of fuzzy. It is cold outside. (Cold to whom? Cold compared to what?) &#8220;The fact is, they were aggressive.&#8221; Oops. &#8220;Aggressive&#8221; is an adjective. &#8220;The fact is, he is tall.&#8221; Well, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116,32,115,66],"tags":[228,154,227,186],"class_list":["post-4299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authentic","category-communication","category-engineering","category-word","tag-authentic","tag-communication","tag-engineering","tag-word"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4300,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4299\/revisions\/4300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}