I wonder if the early use of the shortened "structure amplitude" is because it was a pain to do any typing, word processing, typesetting, etc before Gutenberg.

But soon crystallographers will be solving all their structures on their cell phones and also just text messaging manuscripts to editors and CCP4BB. So we should probably be thinking of the newer shortened spelling of our scientific terms of the future.

Jim

PS: I vote for that "structure factor amplitude" be used in text books and |F| on cell phones. Student of 2015: "You mean 'abs-F' is really pronounced 'structure factor amplitude'? I didn't know that!"

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