mean plural of forum to most people. So I'm the wrong one to ask.

You're right, but I took Latin for a few years for no good reason, and that's just what my brain does.

There is an important difference in the following two statements.

"Let's eat, Grandma!"

"Let's eat Grandma!"

And self driving cars are far newer than self-deleting authors. They refer to very different deeds.

But in the world today, this is pretty easy to overlook. Kids can't spell anything, nobody proofreads their YouTube video graphics or memes, as an editor I feel your pain. It's just the way of the world now, have to get used to it.

I don’t know the answer to your inquiry, but would you agree the English language is the hardest on the planet? I recall the words of an Old College Professor asking way back in the 70s, “imagine a Citizen of China trying to learn English.” I tried but I couldn’t.

for a while. In addition to the "rough, bough, through" quirks, one of my favorite illustrations of the difficulty of English was to speak the sentence: "I really believe that", twice. The first time, emphasize the word "believe." I really BELIEVE that. The second time, emphasize the word "that" and give it the pitch rise then drop ..."THA-yut." The meaning is the polar opposite of the words spoken in the second example. No student ever quit on me, though.

It's likely intended to differentiate from the others, though your example would probably suffice.

The process to remove one's own post is Powers -> Self-delete this post, so it's probably also worded that way for consistency.

We should always try for the fewest possible words.

The answer is, you’re not wrong, but it’s that way because we think of “Self-delete” as the specific name of a function on DU. It appears as a function in the Powers menu below any of your posts.

Part of this is just for legacy reasons. We understand that it’s clunky, but we deliberately chose to say “self-deleted” rather than just “deleted” in the notification because when the function was new, we wanted to be crystal clear that the post was deleted by its own author and not for some other reason. We didn’t want the notification to be too similar to other notifications.

We don’t mind leaving it the way it is because we still want to make sure that people associate that piece of information with the Self-delete function.

At least, that’s my excuse

as the subject of a sentence, or “myself and the wife”, everything else can be overlooked, in my opinion.