Tell HN: X is dead. Long live X.

24 points by BigCanOfTuna 14 years ago | 14 comments

Everyone knows that X in these two sentences originally referred to "The King". However, the sentences should be interpreted as "The (old) King is dead. Long live the (new) King."

ams6110 14 years ago |

I thought this was going to be a piece about X the windowing system.

saintfiends 14 years ago | |

Same here. I thought Mark Shuttleworth decided the switch to Wayland in next release. You can't really predict these days.

stonemetal 14 years ago |

Sure it does. C# 2 comes out X(old King) refers to C# 1 and X(new King) refers to C# 2. It pretty much is true in the case of C# as soon as a new version is released the old version is dead, there is zero talk about the last version with everything either focused on the current release or the next release.

BigCanOfTuna 14 years ago | |

Very different. There can only be one king.

rudiger 14 years ago | | |

There can only be one latest version, so it's not too different.

veyron 14 years ago |

To my knowledge, the original phrase was intended to make the new king throned immediately after the discovery of the death of the previous king. Unfortunately there's no real atomicity in spoken language ...

As far as the idiom is concerned, it makes perfect sense if you think about the second usage as the set of problems for which the language is commonly used to solve. Take for example JavaScript:

Javascript (the original language) is dead. Long live Javascript (the successor language for the problem of client-side scripting).

This would be a great title for an article about a scripting language like coffeescript

BigCanOfTuna 14 years ago | |

I could see this argument if an article was titled "Client side scripting (JavaScript) is Dead. Long live client side scripting (Ruby)" ...assuming one of the browsers yanked JavaScript in favor of Ruby.

oh_sigh 14 years ago | |

> Unfortunately there's no real atomicity in spoken language ...

Bullshit.

START TRANSACTION;

KING = null; KING = new KING();

END TRANSACTION;

just say it.

jamesrom 14 years ago |

I see this all the time. It doesn't make any sense. It's like how people say 'I could care less'.

veyron 14 years ago | |

in some languages and cultures (especially yiddish), certain expressions are understood to be sarcastic. I think 'I could care less' was originally used in this sarcastic tone (akin to 'Tell me about it' in US circles)

jamesrom 14 years ago | | |

The sarcastic interpretation makes even less sense. Is the sarcastic interpretation 'I could care more' or 'I could not care less'? At any rate, it is definitely not interpreted as sarcasm today, nor is it spoken with any kind of inflection to denote sarcasm.

It's just a pointless statement that has been echoed enough times that we've become accustom to the sound it makes, much like a parrot that mimics 'Polly wants a cracker'.

skimbrel 14 years ago | | |

What I believe the GP was getting at is that "I could care less" is a corruption of the original "I couldn't care less", and one that makes next to no sense as an expression of contempt.

oh_sigh 14 years ago | |

I could care less about your opinion. I value it very highly.

rudiger 14 years ago |

JavaScript (the programming language) is dead. Long live JavaScript (the compilation target)!