Re: Not snazzy (was: New Unicode Savvy Logo)

From: John Cowan (cowan@mercury.ccil.org)
Date: Wed May 28 2003 - 08:02:13 EDT

  • Next message: Theodore H. Smith: "Re: Not snazzy (was: New Unicode Savvy Logo)"

    Marco Cimarosti scripsit:

    > My English-Italian dictionary has two "savvy" entries: an adjective (labeled
    > "fam. amer." = "US English, informal") and a noun (labeled "antiq. / fam." =
    > "archaic or informal"). However, all the translations have to do with
    > "common sense", and none of them seems to explain the intuitive meaning of
    > "Unicode savvy", which I guess is supposed to be: "Unicode enabled",
    > "Unicode supported", "encoded in Unicode", etc.

    In case your dictionary does not explain this, its etymology is the
    Portuguese verb "saber" < Lat. SAPERE, which was used in the original
    Lingua Franca and from there spread into almost all the pidgins and
    creoles of the Earth. As you can well imagine, a pidgin needs a verb
    for "understand/comprehend" as one of its very basic words! So it
    can be verb ("understand"), adjective ("being able to understand"),
    or noun ("comprehension"). The last is the least informal, at least in
    English; the adjective is evidently meant here, and in more normative
    orthography "Unicode-savvy" would be used.

    But I agree that it's bad wording and a bad design. Please try again,
    O Unicode Consortium!

                    Wan pisi ting dat mi av got,
                    Maski dat ting mi no can du,
                    Yu taki yu no savi wat?
                    Bambu.
                            --Lewis Carroll (modern orthography)

    (Note the third line, meaning "You say you don't understand what [I mean]?")

    -- 
    The man that wanders far                        jcowan@reutershealth.com
    from the walking tree                           http://www.reutershealth.com
            --first line of a non-existent poem by:         John Cowan
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed May 28 2003 - 08:48:46 EDT