• MicrowavedTea@infosec.pub
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    17 days ago

    A parentheses-like mark to group parts of a sentence when it’s not clear which part a word belongs to. An example I saw lately that may not translate very well: “You are required to arrive an hour early so there’s time to do x, do y and do z”. Are you required to do y and z or do you just need the extra time to do them? You can usually tell from context but this type of mixup does happen sometimes.

    • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      17 days ago

      In English I’m not sure how you could interpret that sentence in a way where you didn’t have to do y or z, but it is unclear whether it is just x that takes a long time, or if all three things do.