Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>
> On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 08:22:51 -0500, Peter T. Daniels
> <grammatim@...> wrote:
>
> [nb]
> >> What, specifically, means nothing? Surely not "i18n"?
> >
> > Yes, "i18n." I've never seen that collocation outside this List.
>
> It's not at all rare on Web pages that deal with the topic.

Whyever would I go to such websites?

> Google gives
> about 5,830,000 "hits" for [i18n], so it's not exactly obscure. (I didn't
> expect that many, but, "i18n" is a useful four-keystroke form.) One might
> take a different point of view after typing a document that uses the
> traditional form frequently, and without auto-completion in the software.
> Query: What's an equally-brief, or almost-equally-brief abbreviation for
> the word? "Int'n"? Is such an abbreviation unambiguous? Does teh frequent
> use of an abbreviation detract from the formality of a document? ("I18n"
> is a new way of abbreviating, with less risk of ambiguity than traditional
> ways.)
>
> Thanks to my parents and teachers, I still retain a good amount of the
> curiosity I was born with; when I bump into something as distinctive as
> "i18n", my first reaction is to do a Google search, if online. My problem
> is poor ability to manage my curiosity.
>
> ===
>
> Linguistic note:
>
> The art of abbreviating seems to be declining. I have some doubts that
> it's taught properly, if at all, to many, these days and in the recent
> past.
> There's something I call "literary sense", a kind of awareness, that
> revolts against considering the two-letter state, province, and territory
> postal codes to be abbreviations. Many are not literary; their
> two-consecutive-caps. format is not literary. It seems that only a
> minority of copy editors at periodicals still use true state abbreviations.

Chicago 15 has succumbed and recommends the two-letter abbreviations.
That's a change from 14. I don't agree.

> While this might seem contradictory to my support of "i18n" (my first
> reaction was, "What the heck is *that*?), I don't mind embedded whimsy and
> inventiveness, especially if the result is concise and unambiguous.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...