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Look at this:

Suspension description: "temporarily suspended"

A temporary suspension for 10 years with roughly 8 years remaining.

Firstly, is 10 years temporary? I hardly think so. You don't say you temporarily lived in a place for 10 years or you temporarily worked in a company for 8.

In many developed countries, manslaughter only carries 1-2 years imprisonment. If a criminal is locked up for 10 years, it's definitely not temporary.

Furthermore, the definition given by Cambridge Dictionary is:

not lasting or needed for very long

Secondly, there is a difference between "suspend" & "ban". More specifically:

Suspend implies temporary, whereas ban implies permanent.

With these in mind, can we please have better wording for longer suspensions/bans? For example, the following should be just fine:

Revised suspension description without the word "temporarily"

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  • 3
    Does it matter? It's not exactly confusing.
    – Jason C
    Commented Apr 8, 2017 at 6:43
  • 1
    If wording doesn't matter, we wouldn't have 10k+ (reps) grammar nazis.
    – user202362
    Commented Apr 8, 2017 at 6:52
  • 2
    It’s got to be specific. So what’s the alternative? “Permanently” would be indefinite. Do you have any suggestions on wording?
    – dakab
    Commented Apr 8, 2017 at 7:08
  • 3
    Specific, yes. Misleading, no. Adding 4 legs to a snake drawn is not called being specific.
    – user202362
    Commented Apr 8, 2017 at 7:11
  • we can have something similar as for the time: just now, a minute ago, an hour ago, 8 hours ago, 1 day aho, 2 days ago, Apr, 1st, 2017. I'm think of: short, awhile, temporary, long, a generation, a lifetime, for ever.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Apr 8, 2017 at 7:13

1 Answer 1

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The definition of temporary (Oxford English) is:

lasting for only a limited period of time; not permanent.

So the answer to

Is 10 years temporary?

Is "yes". 10 years is a limited period of time that isn't permanent.

You might personally prefer to use a different wording, and by all means suggest one. But strictly speaking, the current phrasing is totally accurate, so you'll probably need to provide a more compelling argument to get it changed.

For your second point, yeah, there's a minute amount of redundancy in the phrase "temporarily suspended". But there's such a thing as over-optimisation, and trying to optimise a well known two word phrase like "temporarily suspended" comes firmly in that category in my opinion. Changing it isn't going to actually improve anyone's use of the site, so why bother for the sake of being pedantic?

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