BTW

[peterbirks]

And so, back to work, and in the middle of what passes for a heatwave in England. Having experienced heat in both Las Vegas and London, I can assure you that 32C in London is a lot worse than 41c in Las Vegas. The humidity kills you.

Mikey abbreviated "Paradise" to "DISE" in his monthly poker summary. Although I have played on Paradise for six years now, the abbreviation did not sink in. Obviously this says something about the way that my brain works, but, since I assume that this "DISE" is a standard American RGPish geek abbreviation, it also says something about the lack of communicative know-how prevalent in the world today.

Although it's tempting to say "what next? will A doctor of Philosophy be known as a Torosophy?", there's nothing wrong with such an abbreviation. We use "bus" for "omnibus" and "flu" for "influenza". However, in both cases, an apostrophe was placed before the word to indicate whence the contraction came. 'bus and 'flu. Only when these abbreviations became words in their own right was the apostrophe dropped.

This is a simple trick to aid communication, to stop puzzlement from those not "in the know". If Mikey had typed "'dise", I might have had to think for a second, but I would have got there fairly quickly. "DISE" by contrast, looks more like a set of initials (especially given the capitals".


The lack of the use of the apostrophe to signal the style of the abbreviation can probably be lain squarely at the foot of the American education system, where the teachers are only fractionally less illiterate than most pupils. The lack of the use of it by Mikey was simply the result of, because he had seen it used in many of the places that he read, he assumed that the abbreviation was common currency, which (at least in my case) it isn't.

I won't bother campaigning Truss-like for the restoration of the apostrophe used in this way to signal an abbreviation. That would be too much to hope for. Just the correct use of propositions would be nicer. But it's indicative of far poorer communicative skills today amongst the educated classes. It's only a technique. But it's falling out of favour.

Comments

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

It was mostly a way of being able to type "D" in the site column of my spreadsheet and have Excel fill in the rest. Hence "STARS", as well. Of course it all fell down when I forgot about PokerRoom, which with Party lacks an obvious abbreviation. It would all become moot if I built a user form, but I think I'll wait until Office 2007 comes out for that. It gives me a nice cushion to talk about it without actually having to do anything.

Of course, one of the blogs you quoted yesterday used the same abbreviation... ;)

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Indeed it did. Rizen referred to the dise $30r, and I didn't know what that meant either. it was one of the reasons that I thought I would ask you. However, the Rizen blog was so far out of my normal loop that it was possible that the abbreviation had been explained at an earlier date.

I realized that another one of the reasons that it didn't click with me was that the two options (to my eye) were "D.I.S.E" which i linked to Doyle's Room for some reason (that being the only room I could think of that started with a "D") or, if it was a word, it was a word pronounced "Dize". The soft "s" in that spelling being patented by the word "dice".

Like I say, it's probably just evidence of the way that my brain works.

In the old days it was easy. Paradise was the biggest and I just called it PP. Stars was "Stars" and Party was PTY. These days Paradise is just one of a number of second division players, so the more recent arrivals treat it on a par with Pokerroom and Ultimate.

PJ

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

Like I say, it's probably just evidence of the way that my brain works.

Mmm.

In the old days it was easy. Paradise was the biggest and I just called it PP.

As evidenced by the abbreviations in PokerTracker. If I'd thought about it, which I didn't because it's the way my brain works, I'd have adopted their codes. Given the ease of Control-H I still just might, now that my brain's worked its (argh, I just had to go back and correct "it's" - it's contagious) way around to thinking of it.

Mike

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

So what is an RGPish geek, then?

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

A good point. It's Rec Gambling Poker. The usenet Poker newsgroup. I would say in my defence that (a) I was rushing in order not to miss my train, (b)it's been around a long time in poker circles, although I accept it would likely mean nothing to a non-poker reader, and (c), unlike "dise", it's easily googlable. I did try "dise" on google, and got nowhere.

(Googlable = easily looked up on Google, a web search machine.)

PJ

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

And there was I thinking it might just me a mistyped RPG geek, which will mean something to the non-poker playing fraternity, but nothing to the poker lot. The perils of having a foot in many camps.

And what is this web, of which you speak?

Actually it'd be interesting to find out what the percentages of blog readers are who fit into the neat boxes of poker, games players in general and GH subscribers in particular

[(Anonymous)]

If my understanding is correct, then technically there is no such thing as the 'American education system' as education is a matter for the individual states. What I can't understand though, is why the quality of public education in the US is so universally poor. Why haven't some states pioneered improvements that the others can copy? Can any American readers explain this?

DY

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

I thought the same thing. In fact, it's only upon reading the comments that I realise it actually wasn't RPGish geek!