Can we have another discussion board please Fencer? Call it English or Language or something and then we can take our quibbles and queries about wording and grammar there instead of filling up Features Requests (of all places, lol). :-)

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However
, having said that, I feel it's legitimate (if slightly cheeky) to piggyback some grammatical discussion on this genuine feature request. Here, then, is a reply to Reza's query about my use of "Logging out".

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Merha
ba Reza,

Reza said:
According to you yourself, it is wrong to say "logging out" because it is an instantaneous thing so continuous tenses don't apply.

But in your own message you say : "Logging out is an instantaneous thing so continuous tenses don't apply."

Lol. Indeed the phrase is "logging out" and perhaps I shouldn't post messages when I'm past bedtime and drooping. ;-)

Strictly speaking the process of logging out does cover more than an instant of time. It takes the time from clicking the [Logout] link to getting the guest-login main page back from BrainKing. But that generally takes only a second or two, perhaps more on occasion. For the user who is logging out (;-)) it's momentary. (And now that I've thought of it, that's the word I should have used, or said "near instantaneous").

But from Brainking's point of view (and thus any users querying the person's status) it is instantaneous. As soon as the site receives the log out request it's as good as done because it will take mere microseconds. If a user sees "logging out" as someone's last action then the system knows and it's already happened - they've logged out. So that's why I say a continuous tense doesn't apply.


So how come you use a continuous tense?

Well, apart from the fact that "instantaneous" was not the perfect word, there's no more succinct way of saying it that I can think of. I could have said "the process of being logged out" or "What happens after clicking the [logout] button", or any number of phrases. "Logging out" is short and sweet.

Perhaps another way of looking at it is that "Logging out" is the name of the procedure - therefore it's a noun not a verb.


And secondly, I think it's just like you're reporting something, a fact, to for example, to the police.

If they ask you "What were you doing?" you say "Looking out through the window."

You are no longer doing that but you say it because at that time you were!

Yes, looking out of windows demands "ing" when you look for a decent period of time; it's continuous. If you had said "I looked out the window" then you'd be expressing a look of much shorter duration (though this time not literally instantaneous, or even near it, because humans don't work that fast - judgement must always be used regarding where you divide the momentary and the continuous).


I think it's quite the same here. Even if the last action of a player has been done ten years ago, I think it is right to say "logging out" since at that time, he/she has actually been logging out!

It depends on what you are trying to express. Let's not use "logging out" because of its momentary (and, here, contentious) nature; we'll use eating.

"I was eating an icecream" puts us back into a past time frame so you can imagine being there looking at me eating. "I ate an icrecream" refers back to that time but keeps our point of view in any subsequent time. If you imagine me throwing the wrapper away or wiping my lips or running for the bus a year later, etc, then you'd say "Yes, you did" - you be maintaining the future-looking-back viewpoint and the whole act of eating would effectively be treated as a single point. If you were to imagine me eating that icecream then you'd be putting yourself back into that point and viewing it as a sequence; and so you'd say "yes, you were eating".

Not knowing the grammar I can't give you labels for this but it's about the time frame from which you view the action. Those who have actually studied grammar should be able to explain these ideas better. That would seem to be anyone not schooled in Britain, lolol - [joke, folks, feel free to argue it; I won't].

Hope this clears things up somewhat.

I'm quite happy to explore other English issues with you so feel free to ask. As you can see, I put some effort into this, so no more than, say, 10 per day, lol. If Fencer gives us an English Language board we can do it there, which could be fun.
:-))

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And my first post there could be about one of the most common spelling mistakes in the gaming context.
"It's lose the game, not loose! Loose trousers lose dignity. Loose language loses respect. Loose play loses games."

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Fen
cer: For some reason, no matter how many times I edited and updated this message, it still appeared with arbitrary line breaks - such as in the word However in the second paragraph.