Changed "Insure" to "Ensure" in comment.
From: "Melissa O'Neill" <oneill@cs.sfu.ca>
Subject: English Usage and Future Features
To: Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 11:14:23 -0700
You wrote:
> Okay, it's out; I just sent an announcement to info-cvs.
>
> Thanks for all the patches; I've pretty much kept my grubby little
> paws off them and applied them as they were (see ChangeLog for
> details).
>
> In fact, I think the only change I reverted was the spelling fix
> "Insure" --> "Ensure". :-) These seem to be synonymous in common
> usage and are also the same (in this sense) according to the
> OED... which is only an authority insofar as it reflects usage
> accurately, I guess, but I trust them to have done their research
> anyway. Believe it or not, this exact question, involving these two
> words used in the same sense, came up in a paper I was editing
> recently.
I'd recommend you check out Lyn Dupre's _BUGS in Writing_. This is an
excellent book, aimed pretty squarely at Computer Science folks writing
papers (although much more widely applicable). It's funny, and very
readable, and has been very well received.
Segment 45, ``Ensure, Assure, Insure'' covers this very issue. Lyn writes
The terms ensure, assure and insure have notably different denotations.
To avoid embarrassment, you should distinguish among them.
You should use ensure to mean to make sure of a state of affairs or to
guarantee that an event occurs.
BAD: Jim was careful to insure that the project went smoothly.
GOOD: Carol was careful to ensure that the party went smoothly.
BAD: Using this software will assure that you pay your taxes on time.
GOOD: Using this software will ensure that you pay your rent on time.
You should use insure to mean to take insurance out on
BAD: I need to ensure my car before I drive it
GOOD: I need to insure my car before I drive it
BAD: Max was disappointed to discover that assuring his hard-disk
had not protected the company against an earthquake-induced
crash.
GOOD: Max was delighted to find that he had insured his laptop
computer before it was stolen.
You should use assure to mean give assurance or reassure.
BAD: To ensure yourself that all is well, turn on the lights and
check under the bed.
GOOD: To assure yourself that the proof is correct, you should take
the time to work through it.
GOOD: To insure yourself, call a reliable company such as Lloyds of
London.
SPLENDID: Rest assured that I have insured your home to ensure your peace
of mind.
SPLENDID: Before I can insure your business, you must assure me that you
can ensure that your programmers do careful quality assurance.
I quoted (slightly cut down) a chunk of the book, not so much to show
this particular point, but more to give you a taste of Lyn's book. Ever
since it was recommended to me by a reviewer of one of my papers (Chris
Okasaki), I've been recommending it to just about everyone.
Of course, you can find out answers to matters of English style on the
Web for nothing, but it's not nearly as fun as Lyn's book. Some other
resources would be:
The Guide to Grammar and Style by Jack Lynch <http://http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/index.html> writes:
Assure, Ensure, Insure.
While ensure and insure aren't quite so clear cut, assure is very
different from both. You assure a person that things will go right by
making him confident. Never use assure in the sense of "Assure that
the wording is correct"; you can only assure somebody that it's
correct.
Ensure and insure are sometimes used interchangeably, but it may be
better to keep them separate. Insuring is the business of an insurance
company, i.e., setting aside resources in case of a loss. Ensure means
make sure, as in "Ensure that this is done by Monday."
The Curmudgeon's Stylebook <http://www.theslot.com/part1.html> covers
similar ground:
ASSURE, ENSURE, INSURE
The words are close in meaning, but they're not interchangeable.
Ensure is usually the correct word; it means to make sure: Before
starting the car, I ensure the baby is buckled in. Assure doesn't
work that way; you assure another person of something: After
ensuring the baby was buckled in, I assured her mother things
were fine. One meaning of insure is to ensure, but better
publications use the word only in references to the business of
insurance: Even if the baby isn't buckled in, her life is insured
for $100,000.
Paul Brians' Common Errors in English <http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/>
is another good resource, which states:
ASSURE/ENSURE/INSURE
To "assure" a person of something is to make him or her confident
of it. According to Associated Press style, to "ensure" that
something happens is to make certain that it does, and to "insure"
is to issue an insurance policy. Other authorities, however,
consider "ensure" and "insure" interchangeable. To please
conservatives, make the distinction. However, it is worth noting
that in older usage these spellings were not clearly distinguished.
European "life assurance" companies take the position that all
policy-holders are mortal and someone will definitely collect,
thus assuring heirs of some income. American companies tend to
go with "insurance" for coverage of life as well as of fire,
theft, etc.
All of these sites are good resources for settling questions about English
usage, as are the FAQs posted to alt.usage.english.
> It may just be a British vs. American spelling difference, now that I
> think about it. Do you use British normally?
The only significant difference between UK and US usage here is that
Brits talk about `life assurance' (because you're going to die, one
day), and Americans talk about `life insurance' (because no one really
wants to believe they're mortal).
An an Englishwoman living in Canada, my spelling is annoyingly midatlantic.
I've always (even in England) initialized arrays, rather than initialised
them, but I use coloured pens rather than colored ones. But most of my
professional writing is for US publications, so I have to adopt US
conventions most of the time.
>> - Spotting when a log message is applied to every file in the distribution.
>
> Ahh... so we could use a special string "all files: blah blah blah"
> for the log entry?
Yes, or even no files list at all. For example, in the EGS changelog, there
is the following entry:
Sun Mar 14 02:38:07 PST 1999 Jeff Law (law@cygnus.com)
* egcs-1.1.2 Released.
>> - Improving the formatting of ChangeLog entries. Long, carefully formatted,
>> entries are currently rather trampled by the wrapping code. (Probably needs
>> a command-line option.)
>
> I've just been thinking about this too. May just modify some code
> from Text::Wrap. I'll bet we can guess right w/o a command-line
> option most of the time. I think a good strategy would be to only add
> newlines, never remove any. So long lines get auto-wrapped, but then
> the next line (in the original) doesn't move up, it stays on its own
> line. And of course, this only goes for the message portion, not the
> filenames.
>
> This way, text that tries to make lists would stay readable. For
> example:
>
> (parse_options): parse the --fish option.
> (stirfry): if `fish' is set, behave appropriately. Adjust call to allergies(), and lower cooking heat based on reference in heat_table.
> (allergies): adjust for fish if `fish' is set.
>
> would get turned into this:
>
> (parse_options): parse the --fish option.
> (stirfry): if `fish' is set, behave appropriately. Adjust call to
> allergies(), and lower cooking heat based on reference in heat_table.
> (allergies): adjust for fish if `fish' is set.
>
> instead of this:
>
> (parse_options): parse the --fish option. (stirfry): if `fish' is
> set, behave appropriately. Adjust call to allergies(), and lower
> cooking heat based on reference in heat_table. (allergies): adjust
> for fish if `fish' is set.
Yes, that seems like a good way to go.
Melissa.
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