Just Wondering

[David Dyer-Bennet]

In article <621 at marob.MASA.COM> cowan at marob.masa.com (John Cowan) writes:
:Well, sometimes.  DEC is a computer company, but "Dec" is an abbreviation
:for December (credit: >Programming Pearls<);

I see Dec and dec for the computer company all the time.  And I generally
use and often see DEC for the month.  The context provides more clues than
the casing does.

:"Billy" and "BillY" are probably distinct e-mail names.

Probably, but this is outside the range of normal English usage and back
into computer conventions.

:NASA would look pretty odd as nasa, too.  

I see the lower-case version on the net all the time, and it's never confused
me or even slowed me down.  In this case, there isn't another common term
that differs only in the formally-correct casing, so there's no ambiguity
to resolve.

I continue to believe that a trained English reader is essentially a
monocase device.  The casing rules that exist mostly don't serve to
disambiguate otherwise identical terms, and when they do they are mostly
not followed; yet people can read the stuff anyway.
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, ddb at terrabit.fidonet.org, or ddb at ns.network.com
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