On Wednesday 29 July 2009, R.S. wrote:
> Is it so hard to understand that acronym/abbreviation is not a thing
> that IBM or other company could establish?
Or any grammar Nazi wanna-be.
> This is simply part of language we use....
>
> Like SMS: for us it's Storage Management Subsystem, but Windows
> people know other meaning and we all us SMS in our mobile phones (not
> to mention Novell SMS). None of these acronyms had to be formally
> accpepted by any company or agency.
>
> In most cases the meaning of acronym is obvious from the context, for
> exceptions it is perfectly OK to make disambiguation at the beginning
> - like "Unix System Services (USS)" or simply avoid acrynyms at all.
> And voila. No holy war is needed.
Amen. Let's take another example: DSN. Any serious mail
administrator *knows* that it stands for Delivery Status Notification -
end of discussion - although most of the world's database
administrators mistakenly believe that it stands for Data Source Name
(ODBC). And both look on the meaning of "Data Set Name" as an amusing
atavism, if they've ever heard of it at all.
As one whose academic background was in linguistics before stumbling
into the field of computers, I have to reiterate David Alcock's dictum:
> Languages evolve. Thou shalt evolve too.
Cheers,
Bob
--
Bob Woodside
Woodsway Consulting, Inc.
http://www.woodsway.com
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