I don't want to blame “sharp” for # on Microsoft. Back in the 1970s, it was the standard pronunciation around the University of BC. And in those days, many terminals and other output devices were somewhat low-fidelity, so the difference between the octothorp and the sharp would not have been visible.
> … may have come from an inexact contraction of SHArp bang or haSH bang, referring to the two typical Unix names for them. Another theory on the sh in shebang is that it is from the default shell sh …
Deeply sadened there is not entry for this with "splosh dot", as that and "bang" are the ones everybody I've worked with used over past 3 decades, though mindful that may well be a local cultural thang from the UK.
As for ~ even sadder there is not entry for "swan hyphen".
"Pling" seems to be uniquely British, with usage sometimes documented as in the Commonwealth countries too.
Its actual origin seems to have been within Acorn Computers, and thus spread mostly to countries where Acorn computers were sold in any numbers, which notably does not include the USA.
On Acorn computers, application bundles are directories prefixed with a Pling, so the Paint application is called "!Paint", pronounced, "Pling Paint", for example.
I care zero, it's still "F stab" to me. And URL is "earl". But despite favoring the short version for those two, I always spell out every letter of SQL, and pronounce etc as "et cetera". None of it is consistent or rational and it doesn't matter because pretty much all of the time people know exactly what you mean. Perhaps I was lucky that one of my first bosses who'd been using UNIX since the 80s pronounced vi like the first two letters in violin. First and only guy I ever met who said it that way, but we all still knew what he meant.
I think tab and table come from the same root. Tab stops existed on typewriters prior to tab keys on terminal keyboards, and I presume it was a shortening of tabulation stop, i.e. a way to more easily input data in a tabular form or a table. So I always internally read fstab as "file system table" and crontab as "chronology table", or something similar.
In the 80's I worked with a guy who had a theory that most people who grew up with SQL in the early days pronounce it "sequel", and the younger generation was more used to saying it as the letters; S-Q-L.
At $PREVIOUSJOB I worked with a guy from Boston who pronounced "query" as "quarry". But he had a lot of bizarre pronunciations, so we just let it go. And not just because Boston, either.
AFAIR when SQL was introduced there were rumors that IBM decided to use SQL for its name because there was another language called Sequel. So they used an acronym (full name was Structured Query Language).
You should not feel any shame at being the victim of *nix's anarchic names.
I can still recall, with Proustian clarity, my feelings upon learning 'cat' and, simultaneously, that it stood for 'concatenate': "but surely in 99% of cases you are 'catting' a single file, so that name makes no sense". Was I wrong? I was not.
Reminds me of the brain fart I had one day looking at a ps output that had line wrapped and wondering what the heck the "c lock" process was. I felt foolish about ten seconds later.
I only recently learned that /usr was an acronym and not just a shortening of "user". Are we supposed to say each letter??? I've been pronouncing it as "user" this whole time!
Supposedly, usr was supposed to be “user”[0] but was switched after the Unix guys needed more disk space and split the file system into the / and /usr mount points.
Then /home was made because /usr was filled up with other things.
So that's what that symbol meant on the good old КУВТ-2. Now my life is complete.
Having learned Unix-y stuff in non-English environment, I still pronounce a lot of things in a weird way despite having very little accent otherwise. /etc will always be either "ye-t-k" or "ye-t-tse" and yum will be "yu-oo-m"
It's fun working with people from different countries who have developed their own regional pronunciation. I recall French colleagues pronouncing a lot of stuff that commonly starts with ch- (chroot, chmod, chown etc) with a sh- sound. Other people (including me) pronounce both letters C and H. I like that a lot of common tools don't really have a canonical pronunciation because they have spread in use far beyond the English-speaking world. I wonder if in a distant future where languages have developed to the point of being unintelligible to today's humans they'll still be running software with mysterious incantations like ioctl and malloc and so on.
> I recall French colleagues pronouncing a lot of stuff that commonly starts with ch- (chroot, chmod, chown etc) with a sh- sound. Other people (including me) pronounce both letters C and H
There is something satisfying in saying “shroot” or “shown”. It never occurred to me that C and H could be pronounced separately, aren’t they an abbreviation for “change” or something like that?
They are indeed an abbreviation for "change". change {root,own(er),mod(e),gr(ou)p}...
I am one of those who say "c-h-..." as well. For some reason I find it less awkward to say than "shroot."
Perhaps the first thing I think of with "ch" is the hard C or K, like "character." That sound wouldn't work in those cases. 'Kroot', 'kown', eh... no, so "C-H-..." it is.
On that note the page mentions"char" at the top, lists "care" and I more frequently hear others use "char" as in to burn. In my groups I think I'm the only one that pronounces it as first syllable of the actual word.
> I recall French colleagues pronouncing a lot of stuff that commonly starts with ch- (chroot, chmod, chown etc) with a sh- sound.
Some other annoying pronunciations I sometimes hear are "yoom" and "pooty" for Yum and Putty. Yet for some reason they get GRUB right, I haven't figured out why.
English isn't a phonetically consistent language (ex, "u" sounds different in "put" and "dug") so I guess it can be confusing to some when needing to pronounce a new product name.
When I'm thinking "change ownership" I pronounce it ch-oh-n with a long O, but when I just read it in context I can't help but pronounce it like "clown".
Lately I've been listening to Linux-related podcasts and it always takes me a couple of seconds to figure out what they're talking about when they say stuff like "slash et-see". (Which is fantastic, because it recalls "&c", et+c.)
The article says the name "bang" for ! "comes from old card punch phenomenon where punching ! code made a loud noise". That's nonsense since every character makes a loud noise when punching a card. I've never noticed any excess noise from ! but I'll check at the CHM next week to see if I can conclusively disprove this.
Not sure about a punchcard, but an old typewriter I once stumbled upon had a noticeable bang on the !, on cheaper paper it even sometimes punched through the dot part of !
Though it may have been just that particular typewriter and tuning would have fixed it.
P.S. Turns out the very old typewriters did not have an exclamation point key at all! One had to construct it using a period, backspace, apostrophe aka single-quote. Good times!
That's interesting. Wiktionary says that brackets are () in the UK but [] in the US, and that other brackets are called different things to disambiguate them.
Using "brackets" for parentheses certainly sounds odd to me even though I never learned "PEMDAS."
Yes, as someone who lives in the UK I call () parenthesis, [] square brackets and {} curly braces to make it (somewhat) clearer. I pronounce root and route differently for the same reason. But I'm a foreigner so I can take some liberties :)
I personally call ( ) "round brackets" to try and be a bit more explicit about which kind of bracket I mean, but I don't think that's a very common turn of phrase. Similarly I've picked up calling { } "brace brackets" from programming.
From my kids' school maths I know this rather as BIDMAS - with the 'I' standing for indices (i.e. powers), which makes more sense, no?
For my own part, I don't remember any fancy acronyms being rolled out to help us remember this stuff when I were a lad. Kids today grumble grumble etc.
IIRC it was changed in the curriculum at some point, since we had both BODMAS and later BIDMAS.
I imagine it was done for the reason you gave, it does make more sense
When I was in school, we only used apostrophe, comma, open and close paren, exclamation point, question mark, dollar sign, and period. Maybe a percent sign in later years. Of course my exposure to computers in those days was watching TV when the announcer took a stack of (punch) cards from a card sorter and called it a computer (UNIVAC IIRC).
I am glad to see that I have been properly indoctrinated. A little bit disappointed that it doesn't clarify how to pronunciations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_transcription), I was expecting that we could settle on gif once and for all.
They focus on command-line stuff but the graphical stuff is pronounced in various ways as well. For instance, I'm not sure where I got it from, but The X Window System is either "X" or "The X Window System", but not "X Windows". There must be other "rules".
This is so funny, as - after 30+ years in US IT -, while working in a French office, one of my partners keeps asking me to press dièse [djɛz] on the keyboard, and I keep staring at him...
My mind was blown when visiting Sweden in 2002 and finding out they pronounce "www" as "vee vee vee" (not just because the letter name double-v makes much more sense than double-u, but because they were smart enough to shorten it in this case).
Since then I've pronounced it in English as "dub dub dub" and found people generally understand it. I hope it catches on.
Instead of dak, I've heard this and tend to use it as tac instead, which apparently originates from flag separators in the Navy [0], so there is some logic behind it.
You have solved a mystery that has plagued me for years, thank you!
tac took off at a former company of mine and I really like it. The hard t and k sound make it a much a better word than dash if you're describing a set of command line options.
125 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadWe don't call it ampersand because that comes from the English "and per se and".
I think you mean 'dot'.
> … may have come from an inexact contraction of SHArp bang or haSH bang, referring to the two typical Unix names for them. Another theory on the sh in shebang is that it is from the default shell sh …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix)#Etymology
Deeply sadened there is not entry for this with "splosh dot", as that and "bang" are the ones everybody I've worked with used over past 3 decades, though mindful that may well be a local cultural thang from the UK.
As for ~ even sadder there is not entry for "swan hyphen".
Its actual origin seems to have been within Acorn Computers, and thus spread mostly to countries where Acorn computers were sold in any numbers, which notably does not include the USA.
On Acorn computers, application bundles are directories prefixed with a Pling, so the Paint application is called "!Paint", pronounced, "Pling Paint", for example.
I still don’t know what “-tab” is about, but it’s used a lot in /etc. Maybe because the file formats use \t as separators?
At $PREVIOUSJOB I worked with a guy from Boston who pronounced "query" as "quarry". But he had a lot of bizarre pronunciations, so we just let it go. And not just because Boston, either.
I can still recall, with Proustian clarity, my feelings upon learning 'cat' and, simultaneously, that it stood for 'concatenate': "but surely in 99% of cases you are 'catting' a single file, so that name makes no sense". Was I wrong? I was not.
Then /home was made because /usr was filled up with other things.
[0]: Rob Landley of busybox fame recalled on the busybox mailing lists some ten years ago http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...
So that's what that symbol meant on the good old КУВТ-2. Now my life is complete.
Having learned Unix-y stuff in non-English environment, I still pronounce a lot of things in a weird way despite having very little accent otherwise. /etc will always be either "ye-t-k" or "ye-t-tse" and yum will be "yu-oo-m"
There is something satisfying in saying “shroot” or “shown”. It never occurred to me that C and H could be pronounced separately, aren’t they an abbreviation for “change” or something like that?
I am one of those who say "c-h-..." as well. For some reason I find it less awkward to say than "shroot."
Perhaps the first thing I think of with "ch" is the hard C or K, like "character." That sound wouldn't work in those cases. 'Kroot', 'kown', eh... no, so "C-H-..." it is.
On that note the page mentions"char" at the top, lists "care" and I more frequently hear others use "char" as in to burn. In my groups I think I'm the only one that pronounces it as first syllable of the actual word.
Do you mean C as in "s" sound or as in "k" sound, or...?
Oh, the "ctl"s... I got used to pronouncing it at "ka-te-el".
Some other annoying pronunciations I sometimes hear are "yoom" and "pooty" for Yum and Putty. Yet for some reason they get GRUB right, I haven't figured out why.
English isn't a phonetically consistent language (ex, "u" sounds different in "put" and "dug") so I guess it can be confusing to some when needing to pronounce a new product name.
It it confusing, yes. You can understand it through tough thorough thought though.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU
Lately I've been listening to Linux-related podcasts and it always takes me a couple of seconds to figure out what they're talking about when they say stuff like "slash et-see". (Which is fantastic, because it recalls "&c", et+c.)
Though it may have been just that particular typewriter and tuning would have fixed it.
P.S. Turns out the very old typewriters did not have an exclamation point key at all! One had to construct it using a period, backspace, apostrophe aka single-quote. Good times!
In the old days I configured my sound card enough times that this sentence is burned in my auditory cortex.
Turns out, as usual, human memory can suffer from bit corruption (but it's not stochastic) :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c39QPDTDdXU
() are brackets [] are square brackets and {} are curly brackets.
certainly if you're from the UK and in maths class grew up being told about: BODMAS - Brackets, Orders Division, Multiplication, Addition Subtraction
I believe PEMDAS is more common in the USA
Using "brackets" for parentheses certainly sounds odd to me even though I never learned "PEMDAS."
() are brackets
[] are square brackets
{} are curly brackets
<> are angle brackets
in school I don't think I ever heard the word "parentheses" used to refer to (), or at all for that matter.
Only in maths or ever?
(Brackets), [square brackets], {curly brackets or braces} and <angle brackets> are the terms used in all fields, maths and normal life included.
In programming circles I've come to expect: () parens, [] brackets, {} braces. Probably easier if we all try to stick to that.
I personally call ( ) "round brackets" to try and be a bit more explicit about which kind of bracket I mean, but I don't think that's a very common turn of phrase. Similarly I've picked up calling { } "brace brackets" from programming.
For my own part, I don't remember any fancy acronyms being rolled out to help us remember this stuff when I were a lad. Kids today grumble grumble etc.
Since then I've pronounced it in English as "dub dub dub" and found people generally understand it. I hope it catches on.
Gee esss dou·ble U 111 2222 333 444 5 for Gun shot wound 111 2222 33333
Instead of dak, I've heard this and tend to use it as tac instead, which apparently originates from flag separators in the Navy [0], so there is some logic behind it.
[0]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/191807/pronuncia...
tac took off at a former company of mine and I really like it. The hard t and k sound make it a much a better word than dash if you're describing a set of command line options.