I’m using one variety of “if”, used in some particular contexts when writing in English. I was doing so only for amusement—of course I don’t imagine that anyone has trouble understanding Jayson_Virissimo’s meaning—and from the downvotes it looks as if most readers found it less amusing than I hoped. Can’t win ’em all.
But it’s no more “not English” than many uses of, e.g., the following words on LW: “friendly”, “taboo”, “simple”, “agency”, “green”. (“Friendly” as in “Friendly AI”, which means something much more specific than ordinary-English “friendly”; “taboo” as in the technique of explaining a term without using that term or other closely-related ones; “simple” in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity, according to which e.g. a “many-worlds” universe is simpler than a collapsing-wave-function one despite being in some sense much bigger and fuller of strange things; “agency” meaning the quality of acting on one’s own initiative even when there are daunting obstacles; “green” as the conventional name for a political/tribal group, typically opposed to “blue”.)
You’re not using English “if”.
I’m using one variety of “if”, used in some particular contexts when writing in English. I was doing so only for amusement—of course I don’t imagine that anyone has trouble understanding Jayson_Virissimo’s meaning—and from the downvotes it looks as if most readers found it less amusing than I hoped. Can’t win ’em all.
But it’s no more “not English” than many uses of, e.g., the following words on LW: “friendly”, “taboo”, “simple”, “agency”, “green”. (“Friendly” as in “Friendly AI”, which means something much more specific than ordinary-English “friendly”; “taboo” as in the technique of explaining a term without using that term or other closely-related ones; “simple” in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity, according to which e.g. a “many-worlds” universe is simpler than a collapsing-wave-function one despite being in some sense much bigger and fuller of strange things; “agency” meaning the quality of acting on one’s own initiative even when there are daunting obstacles; “green” as the conventional name for a political/tribal group, typically opposed to “blue”.)