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I can speak for anyone else, but I reread the rule when I saw this thread, I considered the option of a whole unit being forbidden from entering play and decided it was absurd and nothing I would ever want to see in a game. It wasn’t necessary to break sentences down into auxiliary verbs and whatever else, the undesirability of the conclusion was enough to reject it.

There's also a problem with using that level of analysis as I sincerely doubt GW applies the methodology to writing codices, so any conclusion reached would be entirely accidental to the actual intent of the rule.

Nurglitch wrote:No, that's not the phrase I was looking for. The rule is clear, I just didn't give it the proper attention that it required for my comprehension. GW was perfectly clear and I misread it the first time. It would have been nice if someone besides me had checked though.

I offer this as constructive criticism in your own vein.
Generally when you spend a long time being fairly unpleasant about arguing something, to the point that you suggest someone "learn to read" when they obviously can read (participating in an internet forum requires a certain level of reading skill), and then discover that your entire argument was based on your own misunderstanding of the text, a simple "sorry about that" goes a long way towards mitigating any negative feelings you might have created by your tone. Even "My bad... I didn't read it as carefully as I should have." would have done the trick. I am not saying you need to order a few pounds of crow to eat, but since your tone often drifts towards the "you are all unwashed plebes" part of the spectrum, admitting you were wrong about other's abilities to read at least would help the healing process.

And no, GW is not "perfectly clear." Just because meaning can be surgically removed from a sentance does not make it "clear." There is a difference between "writing stuff" and "writing stuff well."

sebster: I don't see how the undesirability of a rule is enough to reject a reading of it. If you're reading the rules then you should want to know what the rules say rather than what you want them to say. Where what the rules say is at question it's quite necessary to break the sentence down grammatically and so on in order to check what exactly the text of the rule stated.

Given that GW employs English grammatical decomposition is quite appropriate to figuring out what the expression of a rule is stating, especially since the meaning of an expression is not 'intent' of whichever agent made that expression. The further but un-necessary levels of analysis, the logical and semantic, I did not go into since the rule stated was so structurally simple.

Wehrkind: When I suggest that someone learn to read I do not suggest that they cannot read. I suggest that they have not fully applied the skill of reading. I've already explained that. Reading isn't some program we all have that simply needs running, it's a skill that we develop and train through proper application. Indeed I pointed out that I was suspicious of the reading I argued in favour of, a reading that anyone could have come forward and corrected me on had they an interest in doing so. As I've also pointed out part of reading is reading charitably, so if people want to read a negative tone into my posts that isn't there, as though I considered them "unwashed plebes" rather than fellow interlocators, then that's their problem as I use a neutral tone. I appreciate the criticism but since it is manifest that I am not wrong about people's skill in applying their reading skills (especially my own, it seems!) I'll take your advice under consideration.

And yes, GW's Warhammer 40k rules are perfectly clear. Every rule I've analyzed so far on these boards shows the clear expression of a rule in grammatical English, and only through mis-reading, my own and others', has their meaning been muddied. Where we patiently analyze the text of GW's Rules, on the face of it thus far, it appears that it is their writing that is clear and it is our reading skills as end users that could stand improvement. They write well enough, we just need to read them well enough. Since reading them well enough is merely a matter of patience and application, as I am demonstrating on another thread, we can engage in productive discussions about those rules rather than silly arguments about what we want the rules to mean or what we misread the rules to mean. Indeed by reading the rules properly we can distinguish what we want the rules to state from what the rules actually state, and we have a simple procedure by which we can correct each other when we misread the rules.

As odd as it may sound I'm rather glad that I misread the rule at first. While it would have been better to have someone else correct me, I think it served as a good example of what I'm talking about, that I applied the correct method in order to prove my point and found my original eyeball opinion of the rule to be incorrect. Hence I have demonstrated that I was in error and what I should have read, had I applied my reading skills properly rather than carelessly.