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stranger
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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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stranger
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What about "disestablishmentarianism"?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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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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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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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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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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addict
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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]. 
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