DEC

On Friday, December 13, 2002, Chad Fernandez wrote: I say "deck". When I'm talking about DEC with people who don't know much about it (e.g. PC-only programmer friends), I usually first say "Digital Equipment Corp., aka D-E-C, aka DEC" so that they don't think I'm saying "dick". I've been a little paranoid about that ever since this one time when I was trying to sell an old computer, and I pointed out to the potential customer the "floppy dick drive" by accident. Most sources of computer information for me when I was growing up were textual. And until I went to college, there was no one with which I could have computer-related conversations. So I developed my own pronunciations, which sometimes did not match others'. For instance, most people said 'pascal' as "pass-COWL", but I said it as "PASS-cul". I also got in the habit of wordifying C functions; I would say 'strncmp' as "STERN-cump" and 'vasprintf' as "vuh-SPRIN-tiff". Thankfully, Java has made pronunciation quite easy for today's young nerds. Instead of easily mispronouncable abbrevs like 'xgetri()', they have names like 'getTheRemoteInformationAndParseIntoDiscreteUnitsForFurtherStudy()'. (Hey, I love Java, but sometimes those identifiers are just too long!) -- Jeffrey Sharp