No, its just how some people mangle English. I didn't go to Oxbridge, but a lot of my workmates in the eighties did and they sometimes wrote very strange sentence structure. An American instance: Prof Dave Mills (certainly in no sense a peer, since he's out of my league, but we did write on the same arpanet and pre great renaming Usenet lists. Also he didn't go to Oxbridge) says this of his own style of writing:
It is an open secret among my correspondents that I on occasion do twitch the English language in mail messages and published works. Paper referees have come to agreement on what they call millsspeak to refer to the subtilities with which I personalize my work. If you read my papers or my mail, you know my resonances. If not, you can calibrate my naughtimeter from children's books
Jon Crowcroft, who is a CS professor in Cambridge, but was a phd student in ucl-cs when I worked there in the eighties: http://paravirtualization.blogspot.com/ also, probably presumptuous to call him a peer: if he keeps going, he may be one both literally, and by appointment. Of the realm that is, not I.
Overall I think I miswrote above. Absent a time machine, it stands.
Obviously, this stuff irritates a lot of people. I apologise, but really at this stage I doubt I'm changing.
Btw, and please forgive me if this is a breach of privacy but HN comment history shows you've accumulated a 25 year deep curated unix command history file. If I had the forethought to have done the same (which btw, is a brilliant idea) it would be older than yours. It most definitely would not be better, and very possibly more narrow in focus. I suspect, the pretensions of written English aside, we're not that different.
