Sorry, everyone, I know that the horse is long dead but my wife is a tech writer: On Thu, 2003-03-06 at 06:22, Gibson, Mark wrote: > >Finally, last para of sectin 4.5, "Mnemonics appearing in the > Abstract" > >and 'meaning of the mnemonics "IP" or "TCP" or "MIB"' -- you mean > >acronym, not mnemonic. > > > Um, you mean abbreviation, not acronym. No such English word as ip, > tcp of mib as far as I know :) Mnemonic, ironically, is actually > closer in meaning since IP is kind of a de facto mnemonic for Internet > Protocol. > > > http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=abbreviate*1+0 > http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=mnemonic*1+0 > http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=acronym*1+0 > "IP": _I_nternet _P_rotocol certainly qualifies as an acronym. The difference between an acronym and a mnemonic is that in the former, the letters used are really the first letters of the intended phrase. While mnemonics often use the first letter of other words, they'll often be unrelated to the subject. By way of an example that will make this message marginally IETF related, there was a pre-CIDR thought to use the 208.0.0.0/8 address space as 12-bit wide network masks. The mnemonic for this range was the "C#" class (C-sharp, for the black key between C and D on a piano). It was abandoned for CIDR since we all realized that this approach wouldn't, um, scale.