The first attempts

[Mark Oliva]

No you probably didn't get it.

Jo mei! Failed again!

What Chick meant was that water bodies without outlet are always out of equilibrium temporary structures. So they exist in the sense a pencil standing on the point may exist too. But not for a very long time.

No. I don't think she meant that. And if you read her last posting, I think she told you so herself. Besides that, what you state above has little to do with reality. The Great Salt Lake, Pyramid Lake and quite a number of inland lakes that are river terminals have been around for a long, long time and will continue to be around for a long, long time, if the world survives that long.

Same for the rivers. They go always straight downhill at every point. That means that they always follow a geodesic. But a geodesic is not synonymous to a straight line. So going straight downhill at every point (following a geodesic) and following a straight line are 2 completely different things. Rivers do the former but generally not the latter.
And that's why we have a river police

Then maybe we need language police too, because straight means straight. Nothing more and nothing less. It's true that a geodesic is not synonymous with a straight line. Only a churl would argue otherwise. But rivers do not always (flow) straight downhill at every point. Some of them zigzag downhill like a drunken bumblebee. Farther below you use German. It may be that you are somewhere else and have only studied German. You list your location as Berlin and Paris. So maybe you know something about Germany too. You might even know something about Bavaria, and if you do, you probably know something about Franconia. In that case, you know what the Main River is. The Weißmain (White Main) has its source in the Fichtelgebirge (Spruce Mountains) in Northeastern Bavaria near the Czech border. The Roter Main (Red Main) has its source near Bayreuth. The two young rivers flow downhill zigzagging here, there and everywhere until they flow together near Kulmbach, forming the Main, which then zigzags insanely westward to Mainz, where it flows into the Rhein (Rhine). Along the way it forms the Mainschleife (Main Loop) and the Mainviereck (Main Square) and over a stretch of several hundred miles, there's hardly anywhere a point where one who knows how to use the English language properly would apply the word straight. It simply doesn't belong there.

Of course, one might argue that this is an exception to the rule. But that isn't true. I know quite a number of rivers in many places that twist and turn and reject the word straight. The Main, like most rivers, twists and turns downhill and almost never flows straight downhill.

(Wasser fliesst immer gerade nach unten, einer geodetischen Linie folgend. Dies bedeutet aber nicht dass die geodetische Linie eine Gerade ist. In der Regel ist sie es auch nicht.)

Ja mei. Und wenn Du Deutsch benutzen willst, dann sollst Du auch wissen und verstehen, dass es in der deutschen Sprache so was wie Deine ungerade Linie nicht gibt. Die deutsche Sprache ist die Sprache von Goethe und Schiller. Man soll sie richtig benutzen!

So ... why is all of this worth debating over? I think all of us who have English as our mother tongue and who participate in discussions here really ought to pay attention to the growing number of people coming into the guild who have another mother tongue but who obviously are excited about getting in here despite their possible embarrassment about not being perfect in English.

When we give advice here, we want people to be able to understand and use it. When we have someone who already has trouble with English and we use the language poorly, our attempts to enlighten are likely to confuse instead. It seems to me that the list has a growing number of new people who have difficulty with English but who are forging ahead anyway. I can say only Bravo! Brava! (Jo mei! That's Italian!) This guild is about cartography, not about mother tongues! Let's be kind to them! Let's use our English well and not confuse them by trying to explain to them why crooked things are straight. Let's do it right!