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Years ago, a grammar school riddles asked "which is the longest word?".
The answer was "smiles", since it has a mile between the s's.
Steve Darr
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stranger
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What about "disestablishmentarianism"?
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pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosiswelcome, folks!  you might like this page, too: longest wordsI've had some fun exploring the old threads on this topic. there are a few! 
Last edited by etaoin; 06/05/06 12:55 PM.
formerly known as etaoin...
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stranger
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as I understand it, i18n is the abbreviation for internationalization, and L10n is the abbreviation for localization (preferentially not l10n - the lower case L is ambiguous in many fonts). The 18 and 10 stand for the number of letters omitted. I have to say this is the laziest and least informative way to abbreviate a term I have ever encountered. I suspect it is not so much an abbreviation as a shibboleth.
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I suspect it is not so much an abbreviation as a shibboleth.
Why? Both of the words are long and commonly used, at least in the IT industry in which I work. And the abbrviations are easy to remember and use. You can look them up online if you're unfamiliar with them. They've been around for at least a decade. Many outsiders see jargons or dialects as intentionally obfuscating, but for the people who use them, they are not in the least.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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its easy enough to program a word processor program to "auto correct" I18nand put down internationalization (so 4 keystrokes will produce a 20 letter word in the text.) just as most WPP will auto correct teh and replace it with the.
(this offers users the writer the advantage of using shorthand, and readers easy understanding what is being talked about.)
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Pooh-Bah
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Quote:
I have to say this is the laziest and least informative way to abbreviate a term I have ever encountered. I suspect it is not so much an abbreviation as a shibboleth.
I had to look up shibboleth, an act which may or may not have involved irony. Anyway, I think the terms L10n and i18n are jargon, not meant to be informative abbreviations at all. I suspect that in situations where internationalization and localization are issues, employees have to use the words frequently in office memos. They get tired of typing the word out, so they invented i18n as a stand-in.
If they use Microsoft Word, and I'm sure many do, they could easily have MSW type it out for them. Just as MSW can auto-correct common types like the dreaded "teh," it can be made to auto "corect" short hand words into longer ones. I use this feature extensively, so that when typing on my home or office computer I can type stuff like "a/w" and it gets changed to "associated with" in the blink of an eye.
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I do not use a word processor to write emails, I use a mail client. My audience knows what i18n and L10n mean, and to them they are not obscure. The other place I see the abbreviations extensively used is on whiteboards. If I were writing a manual for general consumption, I would type out the full words.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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stranger
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Ok, my point was overstated. I just was struck by the novel (to me) mechanics of forming an abbreviation by listing the number of omitted letters. It seems so arbitrary. The number itself doesn't convey any information. It just seems odd. I know every specialized field needs its own technical vocabulary, and nobody likes to type. The IT field is full of clever or punning acronyms like TWAIN (which may or may not stand for "technology without an interesting name"), pronounceable (GUI, BASIC, DOS, WYSIWYG), self-referential ("TLA" = three-letter acronym) or even recursive ,like GNU ("GNU's not UNIX"). "Unix" itself was originally a geek pun on "Multics". Seems like someone could have done better for L10n and i18n. No matter, if people know what it means. "IT" stands for "ivory Tower", right? (kidding!)
Auto-correction is very handy for pranks. Years ago, we configured a colleague's copy of MS Word, so that when he wrote his name formally (e.g "Jonathan, Q. Smith, P.E.") MS Word would auto-"correct" it to
"Jonathan, Q. ("I'm not wearing any pants") Smith, P.E.".
It took about a week for him to trigger it and he was absolutely dumfounded.
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It is gratifying to know what the numbers mean in those terms. Both are at least far more palatable that exceedingly annoying lazy-typing fragments like "Pls" and "ur" [just a cynical opinion]. 
ÅΓª╥┐↕§
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Pooh-Bah
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Looks like Helen and I entered the same auto-correct remarks at exactly the same time. What are the odds of that? Quote:
Seems like someone could have done better for L10n and i18n. No matter, if people know what it means
Well, L10n looks a little bit like "lion" if it helps any. If this is adopted I hope to be lionized accordingly. I could not resist, Jackie. Please forgive. After all I am a Leo.
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stranger
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Red Skelton said the longest word in English follows the phrase "And now a word from our sponsor." It gets longer and longer!
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stranger
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Mercer--I actually came to post here thinking of "antidisestablishmentarianism" which my Bible teacher taught me in religious high school, LOL.
M
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I think I've posted this here before, but. when someone in the antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters) longword camp discovered that the longest word in OED was floccinaucinihilipilification (29 letters), they went right out and coined the word pseudoantidisestablishmentarianism.or, is there no end to this madness?!
Last edited by tsuwm; 06/06/06 01:13 AM.
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Quote:
just as most WPP will auto correct teh and replace it with the.
And I do wish they wouldn't. Teh is a perfectly good Indonesian word meaning tea.
Bingley
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Is there a word which describes, or otherwise articulates, the propensity for using a longer, more obscure and, mostly unpronouncable, word in favour of another, equally descriptive, single word? The shorter word is, perhaps, better understood and usually half the length of its more pretentious alternate.
"Internationalization" requires two whole sentences to tell us what it could mean; "honorificabilitudinity" is explained as, "honorableness". Why do we need h20y any more than we need Floccinaucinihilpillification to describe something as worthless?
mclean
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Are you thinking of sesquipedalian?
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Darn - beat me to it. Sesquipedalian is the mot juste. I like that word because it is self-describing, like "polysyllabic". Unlike self-negating words like "monosyllabic" or "quotidian"
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Pooh-Bah
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I always have liked
Konstantinopolitanischedudelsackpfeifenmachergesellschaft
(Bagpipe-pipe maker company of Constantinople)--Wikipedia
I've found variations with different spellings
Last edited by dalehileman; 06/06/06 06:24 PM.
dalehileman
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Quote:
Why do we need h20y any more than we need Floccinaucinihilpillification to describe something as worthless?
actually, I believe floccinaucinihilpilification is the *classification of something as worthless; perhaps this is slightly less worthless, he queried with questionable floccinaucinihilpilification?!
edit: oops, only one 'l' in pilification.
Last edited by tsuwm; 06/06/06 07:09 PM.
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its easy enough to program a word processor program to "auto correct" I18nand put down internationalization Really?? How cool!
EDIT: Welcome aBoard, Steve, mercer, and Harry. Good to have you!
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its easy enough to program a word processor program to "auto correct"
It's not really programming in any technical sense. In fact, the word processor is already programmed to do this, and the user is simply choosing to turn the function on or off. By default, Word does just this. (I've gotten pretty good at turning all these annoying features off in a little under ten minutes: auto-correct, auto-format, damned Clippy "help" animation, etc.)
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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shibboleth
1382, the Heb. word shibboleth "flood, stream," also "ear of corn," in Judges xii:4-6. It was the password used by the Gileadites to distinguish their own men from fleeing Ephraimites, because Ephraimites could not pronounce the -sh- sound. Figurative sense of "watchword" is first recorded 1638, and it evolved by 1862 to "outmoded slogan still adhered to." A similar test-word was cicera "chick pease," used by the Italians to identify the French (who could not pronounce it correctly) during the massacre called the Sicilian Vespers (1282). online etymology dictionary
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the word processor is already programmed to do this Ah. As might be expected, I just have what my computer came with: Microsoft Works (not Word), and I have yet to get it to do one single thing I've wanted it to do. So--I know pretty much nothing about word processing except that it's boustrophedonic. (  I LOVE that word!!) At least, the ones at my former office were.
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Pooh-Bah
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Yeah there is a good bit of stuff to be deactivated before I find MSW to be bearable.
To change the auto-correct feature go to Tools on the menu bar, left click and then select AutoCorrect Options... from the menu that appears. The cursor will be flashing in the field "Replace:" for you to enter the keystrokes you want to use. Then hit the tab key or click on the field labelled "With:" to enter the full text that you want to be associated with your shorthand.
If you have already typed something out and copied it to your clipboard before going to the menu as above, then the second field will already contain that word as a default. This can be helpful when you are using autocorrect to do formatting stuff like subscript or superscript. For example if I want the computer to always give H2O a subscript 2, then I go to the trouble of doing it myself once, then selecting the word, and then entering plain old H2O into the first field. Note that the radio button for "formatted text" must be selected rather than the "plain text" button for this feature to work. I think it will default to that if you've copied formatted text but sometimes you have to do it manually.
If you want to make it stop autocorrecting a word, such as teh, you enter teh and then just click on the button marked "delete." Then it will no longer correct teh and you can wax poetic about your favorite teas.
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I know pretty much nothing about word processing except that it's boustrophedonic.
It is? How? I've heard people describe old dot-matrix printers as boustrophedonic, but never a word processor.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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It is? How? I don't know. We recorded our entries, which were transcribed by the folks in the secretarial pool (sorry, don't know the PC term for that), one of whom told me that their word processors produced the typing that way. Maybe she was pulling my leg, but I seem to recall visiting the pool to observe this wonder. Seems as though there was, in place of where the keys on a typewriter would have been, a central ball that turned according to whatever character had been hit on the keyboard. Possibly this was some other type of machine, but they called them word processors. This was in the late 70's -- early '80's.
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it must have been stored in some sort of memory before it actually printed.
formerly known as etaoin...
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Ah, word processor as a dedicated machine (cf. my mention of dot-matrix print heads) would make sense, but when I hear "word processor" these days I think of a piece of software.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Quote:
… Microsoft Works …
My favorite computer oxymoron.
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Well, L10n looks a little bit like "lion" if it helps any. If this is adopted I hope to be lionized accordingly. Would you settle for being bit by one?
ÅΓª╥┐↕§
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... "honorificabilitudinity" is explained as, "honorableness"...
Certainly no self-respecting Klingon would be caught dead saying, "You have no honorificabilitudinity." It would be way too much hypocrisy.
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Pooh-Bah
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I use the autocorrect feature - in both Word and Access - all the time. It saves me scads of keystrokes. My uncorrected daily work would be indecipherable to most ... here is a sample ....
sd
matf - Issue - det revs
st
constr revs
ga
/foia - Exception - Highways - ap det ql
These are index headings for a research service.
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stranger
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jeez louise......... remember the Navajo code talkers in WW2? We really haven't come that far.....
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