Rants
2012-03-11; Irena Sendler
You may not have heard of Irena Sendler
(in Polish, her name apparently is Irena Sendlerowa). If you
haven't, I strongly recommend you take a minute and read about her
on the Wikipedia page. I'll wait right here...
Once you have read a bit about her, here's the tragedy; she has
not yet been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and it does not appear
that it will ever happen. Un-freaking-believable.
2012-02-27; Acronyms and Initialisms
Wikipedia's
current take on the debate
Years ago I ran across a web page written by a professor of English
on the subject of acronyms versus initialisms (also called
initializations). His take was that an acronym was a pronounceable
word, and an initialization was not. For example, the US government
agency NASA was an acronym, since most people speak it as "nassah".
The US Department of Defense, DOD, is an initialization since most
people say "dee oh dee" rather than "dodd".
Not a particularly vitriolic rant, but something that's bugged me
for years. In the US alone, there must be tens of thousands of
English professors, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of English
teachers in secondary schools. It seems strange that the profession
of English professor/teacher does not seem to be striving for
meaningful linguistic evolution. Instead, we get new slang words
added to the dictionary such as "unibrow".
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