DEC

From: Jeffrey Sharp <jss_at_subatomix.com>
Date: Sat Dec 14 11:47:00 2002

On Friday, December 13, 2002, Chad Fernandez wrote:
> Do you pronounce DEC as "Dee Eee Cee" or as "deck"? I've always called it
> "deck".

I say "deck". When I'm talking about DEC with people who don't know much
about it (e.g. PC-only programmer friends), I usually first say "Digital
Equipment Corp., aka D-E-C, aka DEC" so that they don't think I'm saying
"dick". I've been a little paranoid about that ever since this one time when
I was trying to sell an old computer, and I pointed out to the potential
customer the "floppy dick drive" by accident.

Most sources of computer information for me when I was growing up were
textual. And until I went to college, there was no one with which I could
have computer-related conversations. So I developed my own pronunciations,
which sometimes did not match others'. For instance, most people said
'pascal' as "pass-COWL", but I said it as "PASS-cul". I also got in the
habit of wordifying C functions; I would say 'strncmp' as "STERN-cump" and
'vasprintf' as "vuh-SPRIN-tiff".

Thankfully, Java has made pronunciation quite easy for today's young nerds.
Instead of easily mispronouncable abbrevs like 'xgetri()', they have names
like 'getTheRemoteInformationAndParseIntoDiscreteUnitsForFurtherStudy()'.
(Hey, I love Java, but sometimes those identifiers are just too long!)

-- 
Jeffrey Sharp
Received on Sat Dec 14 2002 - 11:47:00 GMT

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