From: James Kass (thunder-bird@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Oct 24 2007 - 00:05:06 CDT
Marion Gunn wrote,
> On the plus side, Philippe, you may safely take the explosion of
> English-based acronyms as a sure indicator of the growing number of
> monoglot English speaker so scared that their language is becoming
> international (not just theirs to use, but everybody's, especially in
> the case of those of them who still harbour a genuine horror of
> polyglots, which we must respect as real fear to them), that they
> feel a genuine need to club together behind acronyms and the like,
> which is silly in the extreme, but please accept it may be better for
> your sanity to see that as being really more their problem than
> yours, as they clearly must spend more time on computers than is
> healthy for any brain.:-)
Couple thoughts, or so.
That is a very long sentence.
Even though there are dedicated Unicode characters (☺,☻) for
the "smiley", most people still use the ASCII approximation.
Is the stereotype of the provincial English speaker who expects
everyone in the whole world to learn English now being replaced
by a group fear that the whole world will?
Most of these "shorthand" items are technically abbreviations
rather than acronyms. (Yes, it's a nit-pick, but this *is* a
technical list. <smile>)
Best regards,
James Kass
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Oct 24 2007 - 00:08:06 CDT