Re: Pronouncing "W" (UUas: Re: "UU" specimen?)

> "WWW" is simple, memorable, and catches the public fancy. However, I
> do wonder whether the person who created it (Tim Berners-Lee?) was
> fully aware how awkward it would be when spoken frequently in
> English, where it expands to 9 syllables (my count, not necessarily
> correct).
>
> One practical financial commentator on TV (Louis Rukeyser?), not
> greatly concerned with awkward correctness, simply said
> "dub-dub-dub".

It's common for computer geeks to read WWW as "dub dub dub."

> People such as computer programmers sometimes need to read aloud
> what's on paper, and any symbol that requires more than one
> syllable to pronounce is likely to quickly be read as an
> agreed-upon substitute. One that is memorable is "bang" for !.
> The four-leaved Mac symbol (Command key) (U+2318) was sometimes read
> as "splat", apparently.

"Bang" for "!" has been used by printers for decades. When Martin Spekter
invented the symbol which is a combination question mark and exclamation
point in the 1960s, he named it the "interrobang."

When I was in college in the early 1970s, the asterisk character was spoken
as "splat" in our computer department.

> This reminds me that I have called the local NPR radio station more
> than once to tell/teach them that / is *not* a backslash. I told
> them that if listeners typed in exactly what was spoken, they were
> guaranteed to fail to reach the Web site.

I justed heard this on a television commercial recently. The screen showed
a URL with a slash, but the announcer read it as "backslash."

"Recession, repression. It's all the same thing, man."

--Phillip Driscoll
--near Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA