"Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley at speakeasy dot net> wrote:

> Along with recognizing and using a real abbreviation (see my .sig), I
> think a sign of literacy is proper use of subscripts and superscripts.
> All too often, I see such inexcusable barbarisms as "1012", for ten to
> the 12th power, and "H2O". While ASCII* has no provisions for subs and
> sups, HTML does, and the latter are truly easy to use. </rant>
> Perhaps it's the tragic disrepute (or is it social unacceptability?)
> that science and math. have among much of the US public, combined with
> extreme widespread ignorance about basic chemistry that makes these
> in-line forms acceptable. </rant>

1. Maybe it's the fact that ASCII doesn't support subscripts and
superscripts, that typewriters "supported" them only at full character
size and only with manual frobbing of the platen, and that not everyone
writes in HTML.

2. Do science and mathematics actually suffer from "disrepute"? I
believe the part about ignorance, but what could be considered
"disreputable" about science and math? (I suppose religious zealots
might find certain aspects of science disreputable, but I'm not counting
that.)

3. It's not as though "H2O" without the subscript has a different
meaning. Everyone knows what is being talked about, and nobody ever
says "H-sub-two-O" in speech anyway; it's always "H-two-O." And most
people who call it "H-two-O" are not chemists or particularly
knowledgeable about chemistry; they are just using a trendy slang term
for "water."

4. Where did you see "1012" for ten to the 12th power? Who in his
right mind would expect that to be legible?

5. Unicode makes all this easy: H₂O, 10¹².

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/