I’ve always called \ a ‘whack,’ but not sure it was rooted in Unix.
Pronunciation Guide for Unix
21–30 of 126 posts
Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix
#22Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix
#23The 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.
Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix
#24I once had an insanely important job interview where I pronounced “fstab” as “F Stab” not “FS Tab.”
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.
Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix
#25> ¤ > Sonne 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.
Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix
#26! Exclamation point exclamation (mark), (ex)clam, excl, wow, hey, boing, bang, shout, yell, shriek, pling, factorial, ball-bat, smash, cuss, store, not (UNIX) (C), dammit (UNIX) 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…
"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.
Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix
#27I 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!
I think there's some considerable debate about that. "User" is quite common, and certainly not wrong.
Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix
#28I've been chroot wrong for years. I learned recently that it's "shroot" not "C. H. root"
I've already said "ch root", with no gap between the sounds.
Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix
#29The 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!
Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix
#30! Exclamation point exclamation (mark), (ex)clam, excl, wow, hey, boing, bang, shout, yell, shriek, pling, factorial, ball-bat, smash, cuss, store, not (UNIX) (C), dammit (UNIX) 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…
It's also "bang" at my Midwestern university.