On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 23:48:09 -0500, Ph. D. <phild@...> wrote:

> I remember when computer manuals were typeset, and angle brackets were
> used to indicate non-terminals in programming languages. Then most
> computer manuals started being maintained as computer text files, so
> greater-then and less-than symbols were substituted for the> angle
> brackets. But once people became used to this, there was a tendency to
> use greater-than and less-than even when a particular manual was typeset
> and true angle brackets were available.

This reminds me of em and en dashes, which were not available on most
typewriters; today, when a modern computer-text system has been set up
properly, those dashes are available, but typewriter-restricted habits die
hard.

This is also true of subscripts in chemical formulae, such as H.sub.2O;
although subscripting was possible on some typewriters by gripping the
platen knob and lifting the paper by one click, lack of convenient
subscripts (later than typewriters, it seems to me) made people accept
such uglinesses as "CO2" and "H2O". One sees these even on web pages,
where HTML has nice subscript tags, easy to use, but ignored. Moreover, a
very-significant decline in education about science and chemistry means
that many people are apparently not bothered by the failure to subscript.

There was, and might still be, a Boston truck that apparently delivers
liquid carbon dioxide. Prominently on the back of its tank is the chemical
symbol for "di-cobalt" (no such substance), Co.sub.2.

Oh, my. Then, there's the tale (ca. 1964) of the students at Monroe
Community College (Rochester, NY) who painstakingly created a permanent,
huge wall chart of the Periodic Table, and nearly all of the
chemical-element symbols were wrong: They used small capitals instead of
lower-case.

Case is very important for the powers-of-ten prefixes such as mega- and
milli-; engineers learn early to keep them straight. However, computer ad
copywriters are still often uninformed; you see mentions all the time of
such as 128-millibit memory and (used to see), for instance, 600
millihertz CPUs. (Millihertz is a legitimate unit of measurement; even
microhertz. They are slow!)

===

A note about seeing language change before our eyes, even in this thread:
The word "than", as traditionally used, is being spelled often as "then",
as in "more then enough". Whether the "e"-spelling wil supersede the
traditional, I don't know. This seems to be happening because of teaching
emphasis on writing down the sounds of words, combined with often badly
neglecting homophones.

Regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath