I'll come right out and admit it: I'm a pretty self-absorbed person, and I sometimes have a hard time remembering that not everything is always about me. To this day I believe deep in the core of my soul that when I leave the house in the morning, someone somewhere deploys an army of drivers with the specific intent of ruining my commute, personally. It is only when I force myself to confront the general impossibility of such a thing that I really appreciate the sad fact that nobody, to within a margin of error of a few hundred people, cares whether I as an individual live or die, much less what my opinion about something is. The painful truth is that in the scheme of things, I'm just not that important. And whoever you are, dear reader, it is my sad duty to inform you that neither are you.
Anyway, to my point: I learned today that there's a thing in the C++ programming language called a deque, and although it's a recognized thing among programmers, it doesn't appear in general purpose dictionaries. Being unable to look the word up in a reference work, therefore, one of our users was curious about whether it has a standard, commonly used pronunciation, and if so, what it was. So far, so good. Unfortunately, when he posted the question here, the title he gave it was "How do you pronounce 'deque'?"
Do you see the problem yet? In the body of the question, the OP specifically wrote, "I just want to know how most programmers pronounce it." From this, it's clear that the "you" in the question title is being used in its capacity as an indefinite pronoun, akin to one, e.g.: "How do you operate this thing?" But alas, it seems that upon reading "How do you...", several of our high-rep users leaped to the conclusion that the OP wanted to know how they, as individuals, would pronounce "deque"... because, one supposes, it is de rigueur in some circles to while away a February afternoon posing odd and unusual words and asking each person assembled how he or she would choose to pronounce them, similar to how idlers in the royal courts of medieval Europe used to pass the time inventing whimsical names for groups of animals like "a parliament of owls" and "a murder of crows." And because we don't have time for such upper-crust silliness around here, they closed the question as Primarily Opinion-Based, and it remains on hold as I write these words.
But the question is not Primarily Opinion-Based. It should not have been closed. It should be reopened.
"Primarily opinion-based" is designed to stop "What's the best X?"-type questions. It's not supposed to be used on every single question that involves opinions. English has no language academy akin to l'Académie Française; it is what the people who speak it say it is. In a very real sense, therefore, all questions about English are about opinions. Hardcore descriptivists, like many of us here, even shy away from language like "right" and "wrong," preferring instead to talk about "normal usage," or what's "considered acceptable." What are these, if not appeals to the collective opinions of the English-speaking world about how the language should be used?
As such, before we vote to close a question as POB, it's important that we ask ourselves whether the question is really asking us for our opinions on the subject, or simply inquiring as to the common practices of the English-speaking world, or one or more sub-populations thereof. Think about answers as well as questions. If a question asks how you flonjugate an irregular nerb, and there is no commonly accepted practice, that does not mean the question is POB: it means that the correct answer is "There is no commonly accepted practice; everyone flonjugates it differently."
And hey, if there's a way to improve the wording of a question so it won't get closed as POB, edit it! That's what I did. This will be a much better site if we all spend a bit more time looking for ways to save questions, and a bit less time looking for reasons to kill them.
Please help me reopen this question, and let's not be so quick to close future ones.
