Brief vs sometimes abbreviated, etc

It appears you can set use options with “brief”, “superbrief” and “verbose” which exactly match what the player can type in game.

Why then are the checks given entirely different names? The manual says these are the checks to use:

if set to sometimes abbreviated room descriptions: …
if set to unabbreviated room descriptions: …
if set to abbreviated room descriptions: …

You can’t do the following, though:

if set to brief room descriptions: …
if set to verbose room descriptions: …
if set to superbrief room descriptions: …

I’m not sure why Inform is introducing yet more vocabulary here when it has vocabulary that is used in two other contexts (the use options and the player input). It may not ultimately matter but it definitely stands out.

The standard use options for this are “use sometimes abbreviated room descriptions”, “use unabbreviated room descriptions”, and “use abbreviated room descriptions”. The brief/superbrief/verbose ones were added as a convenience.

Right, I got that. But the ‘brief/superbrief/verbose’ clearly have a longer pedigree. Further, there are more concise and descriptive and match the language of the player.

So I know how things work from the manual. I guess I’m asking more why they work that way. Why introduce the more “complicated” phrasings of “sometimes abbreviated”, “unabbreviated” and “abbrievated” when there were already established alternatives available? I come from a development background (albeit too many years ago now!) and I was trained along the lines of “don’t add more elements than you need.” But sometimes you need more elements because they make a difference. So beyond the why I guess I’m also curious about whether there is some behind the scenes difference that it might be good for authors to know about.

Well, “set to brief room descriptions” seems like it means that the room descriptions themselves are brief, which need not be the case. But it might be worth making a suggestion to allow it anyway, since it seems like it makes sense and wouldn’t hurt nobody (and if it did, the developers would let us know).