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... ;)

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

So what is an RGPish geek, then?