Grammar, spelling and the decline of the English language

[SoupDragon]

Moving from the Weird Habits thread, I thought I'd share my favourite typo, spotted only last week in Tescos where they were advertising Winnie the Poo play mats. This was both on the big print sign and the smaller shelf label.

My, how I sniggered in a puerile fashion!

sml2, the engineer, are these genuine? If so please explain oring, grep and gee pee ell (I mean that is obviously GPL but what does it mean???):

"C is the result of oring A and B"
"I'll just grep around and find the file you need"
"Are you going to gee pee ell that software?"

message withdrawn

ks, glad to know I am at least saying ciabatta correctly although I have to hold my hand up to "lartte"

Thanks for ideas, janh and bozza. Just looking at Nottingham Trent's website, sounds promising.

Good luck Xhausted - I really enjoyed my degree. Our course had a really high drop-out rate just after the grammer section, but it gets more interesting!

that would of course be "grammar".

Janh, I think I can guess "oring". It's could be something called Boolean logic and it's used a lot in database searching in my line of work. You can search for A AND B and get results consisting only of references where both can be found. Or, you can search for A OR B and get a larger set of results (C in your example) with EITHER of these terms. Exciting stuff, let's get Sml to reveal the others.

Janh - GPL means Gnu Public Licence, and to GPL software would be to release it as open-source (that is, to let anyone use or modify it). Linux is GPL software, and so (probably) has been gee pee elled at some point.

Not sure about using an acronym as a verb, but there is no other verb for this!

Grep is a UNIX command that has something to do with finding files. Presumably the person you heard saying it was using a UNIX computer (the equivalent term on a Windows computer would be "search". If I didn't have so many problems with them, I might even say "Good old Microsoft"! )

Hello janh,
yes, they are all genuine! I meant to explain them but ran out of time. They illustrate the range of parts of speech which we adapt to use as verbs.

"C is the result of oring A and B"
This means that A, B and C can only have the values 0 or 1, and C will be 1 if either A OR B is 1, otherwise C will be 0.

OR is therefore an operation like plus, minus etc. But I don't know what part of speech it is. In the sentence "A plus B equals C", what part of speech is "plus"? Anyway, it turns into the verb "to or", meaning to apply the OR operation to two values. Similarly, there is a verb "to and" meaning to apply the AND operation (C is 1 if both A and B are 1, otherwise C is 0).

"I'll grep around for that file..."
Verbification of a proper noun - grep is a computer program to find files and hence to grep means to look for.

"Are you going to GPL that software?"
Verbification of an acronym!! this sentence could have been expressed as "Are you going to release that software under the Gnu Public Licence?"

Here's an English example of adjectivisation of a verb, commonly used by software engineers
"Have you added the correct include files?"
include files being files that need to be included.

I must say, I'm with robinw on this one - if it's clear then use it! Why is English so globally successful? could it be because it is uncontrolled and constantly simplified and adapted? I'd hate to have an official version and language police telling us what we can and can't say. Incidentally, the French seem to have successfully got rid of le computer in favour of l'ordinateur, but everybody still seems to say le weekend.

In the industry that I work in, acronyms are endemic, and frequently end up as nouns, adjectives or verbs. I have a paper on my desk at this moment entitled "Ip in the Utran", which always makes me laugh. Internet Protocol in the Universal Mobile Telephone System Terrestrial Radio Access Network of course.

The Third Generation Partnership Project, which is the standards body for 3G mobile phones, issues a whole document of its acronyms for reference. My favourite one is OSPIHOSS = Octet Stream Protocol for Internet Hosted Octet Stream Service. I'm just goin' into town on ma ospihoss...

Sorry, maybe being a bit dim, but I still can't get my head round what "oring" means.
Personally, I hate unexplained acronyms. At work we get periodical communications from our head office peppered with unexplained acronyms ? they're absolutely incomprehensible to most of the people they're sent to. I generally try making sense of the first paragraph, but by the time I get to the fourth obscure acronym, I've decided it's time to give up.

Frieda - it took me a while and I'm a programmer!

It is a progamming term though so I wouldn't worry too much. Basically saying that "A is the result of oring B and C" is the same as saying "everything in group A is either in group B or group C".

Frankly it's a bit pointless and is yet another result of letting semi-literate programmers write anything. Well, semi-literate isn't fair, but technical documentation is usually written by people who are either too wrapped up in the technical details to write properly, or don't care. Dp (another programmer) often comes out with howlers like "x, y and z will help with the website's evolvement".

Thanks for the explanations, everybody, what a computer literate lot you are! I love OSPIHOSS, but why does a Gnu need a Public Licence, please?

lol janh!

Gnu in this case isn't the animal, but another acronym which - paradoxically - stands for GNU's not UNIX (It's just the name that the original programmers thought was funny). So with GPL we have a recursive acronym within another acronym. When will it stop?

I've got a headache.

It's alright for you soupdragon, you don't have to work with the nutters (the people who think these things up that is)

sorry, everyone - "all right".

marina, lucy - our posts crossed, then I got cut off by my company's Internet Police, which automatically stops Mumsnet at 2pm

lucy - I forgot that gnu is also an acronym - shows how conditioned I am!

cut off mumsnet at 2pm?

that's outrageous. In fact if you are an engineer / coder then having mumsnet available is a Health and Safety issue - sometimes you need to fill your brain with other things before it explodes. Well I do.

arrgh. My grammar is awful- I just used "affect" instead of "effect" on another thread and I'm pretty sure it's wrong but can't work out why. Think it must be something to do with "affect" being a verb rather than a noun? Can anyone explain?

Having admitted that I feel an ignoramus when it comes to grammar and wish that I knew more, I do think that sometimes too much emphasis can be put on HOW someone says/writes something rather than the CONTENT of their speech/writing. IME, there's a danger of churning out grammatically correct, pompous guff, empty of meaningful content, if one is not on guard.

scummy - yes, affect is the verb and effect is the noun. So A affects B, but the effects of A are B C and D.

You're right in a way about people worrying too much about it, though. But as several people have said, certain words / constructions have certain precise meanings and it does annoy me when they are used wrongly (particularly if it fudges the meaning).

I am occasionally guilty of causing confusion by using things correctly though. I once deeply offended a friend by saying her child was precocious (which means having an ability beyond your years) - the word has been used so often in the phrase "precocious brat" that people think it means that. In fact perhaps it does now.

But anyway - "...if one is not careful"? I thought you said you were an ignoramus!!

Message withdrawn

message withdrawn

robinw, just pretend you are american...they are both practice in america.