gwyn@brl-smoke.UUCP (03/01/87)
In article <1528@whuts.UUCP> tes@whuts.UUCP (STERKEL) writes: >one of my pet peeves is the perversion of standard English by >computer hackers too lazy to look in the dictionary. Although there is a certain amount of illiteracy and ignorance exhibited by postings on this topic, that is not the only reason that people don't use the proper names for symbols. You might note that virtually all the "correct" names you posted have more syllables than their more common pseudonyms, and are therefore harder to pronounce. To give just one example, at a Xerox 530 site, the operating system (RBM) job control cards started with an exclamation point. E.g., "!RUN", which we pronounced "bang run", not "exclamation point run". Everyone I knew at that site was well aware of the "correct" name for the "!" symbol, but correctness isn't everything. If we hadn't agreed to say "bang" instead of "exclamation point", we might not have survived the experience. It is, however, silly to discuss what the "right" short name is for symbols. Just learn the local dialect and speak it.