On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Frank Solensky wrote:
> Sorry, everyone, I know that the horse is long dead but my wife is a
> tech writer:
Gee. I can beat that. I'm English. ('My name is Wood. Lloyd Wood.')
> 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.
he should have said 'abbreviations'.
> > 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.
only if you pronounce it to rhyme with "trip". In conventional
speech (said to rhyme with 'TCP'), it's not an acronym.
The US tendency is to try and pronounce the unpronounceable - CIDR?
It's 'cider'. Does that make it an acronym? No, because any reasonable
English speaker would say the letters. I was surprised to find 'mib'
pronounced to rhyme with 'crib' - that would qualify mib as an
acronym, well on the way from transitioning from abbreviation to word
(much as radar and scuba already have).
L.
principle/principal. complementary/complimentary. learn the
distinction. insure/ensure and loose/lose are already lost causes.
> 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.
<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><L.Wood@ee.surrey.ac.uk>
