I learned the other day that I've been using "c.f." wrongly for so long, and it is so ingrained into my online writing habits, that I'm strongly considering saying "Eff it, linguistic descriptivism means never having to say you're sorry." c.f.https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/descriptivism-vs-prescriptivism-war-is-over-if-you-want-it/ …
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Speaking of how it's used... it's "cf.", not "c.f.". I'd say that the concept of "native speakers" is a bit meaningless anyway. Nobody learns C as a first language, but there is widespread agreement about most details of how the language works.
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I know (now), but I'm rapidly converging on "Wellllll let's just say that the standards body calls 'c.f.' undefined behavior and the specific sort of undefined behavior people ascribe to it is widely relied upon."
End of conversation
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Ok, but can you at least punctuate it as “cf.”?
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"C.f." seems gross to me but I just learned I've also been doing it wrong, namely, by treating it as abbreviating the English word "confer". Turns out the Latin word "confer" means "compare" and that's the only way "cf." should be used.
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Wait, actually my mistake may have been misusing the English word "confer" as if it meant "compare/consult" as a transitive verb, like it does in Latin. (In English, "confer" can only mean "consult" intransitively.) I'm just too good at Latin, that's what I can tell myself!
End of conversation
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I know it should be v. but my fingers still produce c.f. more often than not
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