NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/alt/usage/english/8748

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From: [e-mail] (Roger Lustig)
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: Apostrophes in Plural forms?
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 21 Nov 92 23:33:17 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
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Reply-To: [e-mail] (Roger Lustig)
Organization: Princeton University
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Charles Geyer) writes:
>> is (Roger Lustig) from article <[e-mail]>

>>> is me from article <[e-mail]>

>>> Is a PCV valve (to use one of your own examples) more complicated than a
>>> carburator or a butterfly valve?  No, but since it's new it gets a TLA.

>> It certainly has a longer name when it's not abbreviated.

>But this misses the whole point.  Why did things used to get expressive
>names like "butterfly valve" and now get names like "positive crankcase
>ventilation valve" (I hope I've got that right, but refuse to bother to
>check), which doesn't bring any picture to mind and is hard to remember?

I'm not sure how expressive "butterfly valve" is unless you want to
know what the thing looks like.  The other name at least tells you what the
thing does (and gven the variety of engines these days, a given valve will
vary in shape from car to car, so its appearance may not be much help in
identifying it in general).

As for being hard to remember, I don't recall ever encountering anyone
who had forgotten it and consequently gotten into trouble.

>Does PCV valve suggest emission control to anyone who isn't a mechanic?

No.  Does butterfly valve suggest any function at all to anyone?

>> Well, van Leunen's example was intended to be journalistic.  I find
>> problems with that approach.

>Well, van Leunen's example was *clearly not* intended to be journalistic.
>The title of her book is "A Handbook for Scholars".  No wonder you find
>problems where none exist when you have no idea what's going on.

Hello?  I wasn't talking about the title of the book.  I was talking about
the example of producers and wholesalers, which read like a newspaper
report.  Yes, it could possibly have been from a scholarly paper on
recent economic history or the like, but from reading it one could easily
place it as journalistic prose.

Either way, her "solution" is problematic.  Metonymy can get you into
trouble as soon as you need to be more precise.

>>> Roger, you have this amazingly panglossian view of the world.  Anything
>>> people say, it is because that is the best of all possible ways to say it.

>> *sigh* I get accused of this all the time; I think it's so much easier
>> than reading what I say.

>>> It never seems to enter your mind that people frequently continue to do
>>> things out of sheer trendiness long after they have become totally
>>> counterproductive.

>> No, most people *don't* do things out of sheer trendiness.  They may do
>> them out of habit -- but language is by its nature a habitual activity.
>> As for the total counterproductiveness, I haven't heard of too many
>> acronym-caused accidents.  Have you?

>Well I guess we have a fundamental disagreement.  Most people *do* do things
>out of sheer trendiness.  Most bizspeak, entertainment speak, news, etc. is
>little else but trendiness.

TRANSLATION: "I don't like it."

Seriously, can you back this up with an iota of evidence?  Can you demonstrate
that fashion in word use is not universal, that it does not reflect actual
needs or desires to express new things or ideas or relationships?  Have
you ever studied the development of a new idiom?

You may label the utterly natural reaction to changes in the world that
most coinages, etc. are, with "sheer trendiness" or other sneering expressions,
but you don't advance understanding of the issue that way.

>> NMR was invented well over 30 years ago; my father completed his dissertation
>> on the subject in 1957.  It was called NMR then too.

>In chemistry.  It wasn't introduced into medicine until the early '80s.

True enough.  Relevance?

>> I'm not sure what your point is about changing NMR to MRI -- initialism
>> either way

>It's that trendiness, again.

WHAT  trendiness?  MRI technology has little to do with classical NMR;
my father, for instance, would be hopelessly out of his league in an
MRI lab.  Why *not* have a new name for a new thing?  Why confuse matters
by giving the *same* name to two slightly related things?

>> (Actually, MRI is quite a bit more accurate!  The N doesn't mean much, as
>> NMR is the only kind of magnetic resonance technique used in most places;
>> and the I for Imaging indicates a new technology of the 80's.

>Oh great!  "I for Imaging indicates a new technology of the 80's".  What
>a great marketspeak phrase!

TRANSLATION: "I don't like it.  NO arguments against it, but I don't like it."

>So all I have to do is end my TLA with an I and I'm high-tech.  Right?

As opposed to the old, low-tech NMR?  Get real.  MRI is quite simply
a new technology.  Care to differ?

>At least for a few years until it goes out of fashion.

TRANSLATION: "Real language is timeless."  Yeah, right.

>Actually the I is stupid because it makes "MRI image" a redundancy and

So who gets killed by redundancies?  We say ATM machine, too.  No
great loss.

>"MRI scan" almost a redundancy and incorrect besides, unless you think
>"scan" is now a needless synonym for "image", for there is no scanning
>involved.

My, aren't we just the techno-whiz.  It's a lot like a scan.  In the
old sense of scan, it *is* a scan.  No meaning is lost if we call
an MRI an MRI scan; everybody communicates just fine.  What does all
this purism buy you, other than a feeling of superiority?

>> Actually, given the wave of scanning technology--CAT, PET, MRI -- some
>> short, easily identifiable names, acronymic or not, were needed to keep
>> confusion down.)

>There's that "scanning" again.  And you've got one of the initialisms
>wrong.  CAT is now also non-trendy, it's CT and has been for quite a few
>years.  It's about time already that CT was declared non-trendy and something
>else substituted.  Besides is there anything in these initialisms to suggest
>that

>  1. All three are forms of reconstruction tomography.  No.  Only two of
>     the three have the T for "tomography".

>  2. CT uses X-rays.  No.  No "X" anywhere in sight.

>  3. PET is a nuclear medicine technique, which involves injection of
>     radioisotopes into the body.

>  4. MRI involves only putting the subject in a magnetic field, no
>     X-rays or radioactivity.

>So I seriously doubt that these initialisms are any more helpful to anyone
>than if the methods were termed "foo", "bar", and "baz".

And yet they *don't* call them that.  And nobody *feels* like calling
them that.  Would you really be happy if, analogous to "butterfly valve"
they called the MRI a "noisy doughnut" or the like?  (You could tell it
from the cat-scan (still pronounced that way) by calling the cat-scan
"not-so-noisy doughnut."  Or perhaps bagel.)

Now, why not spend a moment thinking about how things get named in the
first place.  It's not as though there's a commission -- wouldn't
*that* be fun?  People simply go about their work and name things
conveniently.  Same as always.

Now, of course, some things have made-up names.  Drugs.  The Allegis
corporation.  The Lexus, the Infiniti, and the Oldsmobile Achieva
(gesundheit!).  Tehse names are all cachet and no information.  You
like that better?

>> Come to think of it, modern statistics has been blessed with one of the
>> great coiners of words: John Tukey.  From bit through froot, flog,
>> biweight, and jackknife, he's come up with a good deal of non-acronymic
>> jargon.  Of course, if you're not an insider and want to remember which
>> is the bootstrap and which the jackknife, the words themselves will be
>> of little use -- whereas an acronym (froot and bit are contractions, a
>> whole different subject, though they include initials, too) will help
>> out some if you can identify even one of its component letters.

>Someone once said that even Tukey agrees that a lot of his ideas are crazy.

I'm sure that's true.  I'm glad he has them though -- every last one.

>Nobody uses either the words "froot" and "flog" or the notions they designate.

Not any more.  EDA was used as a textbook in some courses when I was an
undergrad.

>The biweight is only one of many robust estimators and not a particularly
>interesting one.

Relevance?   (Again, it *was* pretty hot stuff back in the mid-70's.  That's
when we got the word, too.)

>Tukey did coin "jackknife" and Efron (not Tukey) did
>coin "bootstrap" following his lead.  But why you think these colorful
>terms are *worse* than if the notions had been given TLA's is a mystery to
>me.  The notion that they are hard to remember is simply bizarre.  It's like
>saying people can't remember the difference between "shoe" and "glove" because
>they aren't acronymic.

Again, you're making up silly arguments and imputing them to me.  I'm
merely pointing out that mataphoric names are only useful if you're
quite familiar with the item in question.

As you damn well know.

>I've never met anyone who had any trouble remembering
>the difference after they were exposed to both.

And I've never met anyone who needed to tell those three tomographic
techniques apart, and who was hampered by the names.  Your point?

>> Oh, come off it.  Nobody "tries to maximize initialisms."  This is
>> silly--imputing some preposterous intent to people whose style you
>> don't like.

>Oh, you come off it.  I've met quite a few novice authors who think that
>an important part of making their writing look scientific is inventing
>as many initialisms as possible.

Well, I'm glad I got out of statistics before it was too late, then.

> I've met quite a few others who have
>the notion that if there is an initialism, it must be used in every
>place in which any reference is made to the notion designated by the
>initialism or anything related to it.

The part after "or" is hard to believe.  Besides, initialisms don't
usually designate notions, but rather more concrete or easily-defined
items.

>"Maximizing initialisms" is not a bad shorthand for the attitude.

Again, this is not my experience, and I've read a lot of papers in
a lot of fields.  But I'm willing to believe that there are such people.
I'm not ready to accept that they're the norm, or that there is "sheer
trendiness" at work.  Inexperience, laziness, lack of writing education,
sure.

Roger