@snailcar Eddie Kal maybe interested.

> The screw should not self-unscrew during operation

Does this sound natural?

Or maybe

> The screw must not self-loosen during operation.

(This is a specification document)

@CowperKettle Why would you need "self"?

That's for once, not a philosophical question

I am kind of annoyed. Someone asked a question involving Human Resources. It had a non-linguistic component (should I apologize for not using a form of address), but the language part of the question was about Ms./Mr./Mrs. I answered that, including giving references for human resources. None of the other answers provided references and I got 5 downvotes. This is just nonsense.

Since questions that are not about the English language are not accepted according to the rules of ELL, I simply decided to ignore it and deal with the language part. According to ELL rules, the answers dealing with apologies are not valid questions.

@Lambie I agree, and I don't know why your answer has been downvoted, especially that much.

Whether the answer-seeker should apologize or not isn't on-topic on ELL.

Questions concerning formality and politeness are, however, so there is value in pointing out whether some expressions are considered appropriate from those aspects.

@userr2684291 Yes, I referenced formal forms of address for a letter to an HR department. Thanks for your support.

> There is no need to apologise for this. This requires no more apology than the time you didn't use "the" in the right place. You are, as you said, a non-native speaker of English.

This is condescending and my biggest bloody pet peeve on this site.

What's worse, is the said (often) native speakers pose themselves as people sympathetic towards ESL.

"Should I apologize" is IPS.

I don't get the five downvotes, but I totally get that the voting system on ELL fails here, yet again.

@Lambie Perhaps your answer came off as a little too . . . prescriptivist for their taste.

What I see is mostly "d'awww, cute learner! You don't need to apologize to anyone, sweetheart!"

Why do they assume learners don't have enough social awareness and deduction skills to understand apologizing is overkill, unless they're from a very polite culture?

Well, I'm done with that post.

@M.A.R. It doesn't sound that condescending, to be honest. They're just saying it's equivalently not a politeness issue.

@M.A.R. There is one more point I want to make here. There was another recent question where the person got 5 upvotes and the answer is far from "standard". That tells me that people just have no idea what they are voting on. The person says that one possible answer to: Do you want to go to a movie, for example, would be: I do do. Well, I am an AmE speaker with very broad exposure to AmE, and that just ain't a thing.

The poster even cautioned against that answer as it can sound like doo-doo. I mean, how can one reasonably even react to that? This is beginning to sound like - pardon the expression - fake English.

Lol.

@userr2684291 Update on the five downvotes: Now, there are only three! Thanks you guys. I'm assuming it was you.

One of those votes was me indeed.

Totally legit dad pun. QED.

@M.A.R. Yes, very funny and pronounced differently than I do do. Ha ha. :) If the dodo does doo doo on the hotel's dado, will the dado be full of doo doo so dada does a deal with a doorman to degrease it? Well, that didn't work out so well.

It's hard to write stuff that is good alliteration.