22 Sep
2010
22 Sep
'10
4:51 p.m.
> In 30 years of college "professorship",
I have seen obvious changes in
> college students. It used to be that I could start my OS class with
> "DOS est omnis divisa in partes tres"
On Wed, 22 Sep 2010, Diane Bruce wrote:
That was a terrible pun you sneaky man.
My
"ViaDisk?" and
"DOS boot" lectures were worse.
But, I always felt that in mastering DOS (or conquering Gaul) that
learning what command to invoke in a given OS was way less important than
understanding the relationship(s) between the BIOS, the
API/BDOS/File-manager, and the User Interface, as well as a basic
understanding of disk format(s), computer history, what trends to expect
in the near future, internal commands V "external commands"/programs,
batch processing, multitasking, etc.
When college administrators asked "Which operating system do you teach?",
I was able to honestly (although exaggeratingly) answer, "ALL."
I translated it fine with my rusty Latin, but it took
me a while to
catch the bad pun.
In the first semester that I started my lecture with that, I
missed it
also!
You have seen the eggcorn database I hope?
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net
I hadn't. Thank you. That's a very nice collection of Mondegreens!
Many of those add substantial additional information content to the
phrases that they replace.
Language change is inevitable. Otherwise we would
still be using
Old English. What I think has changed is we have lost the kite tail
of the written book..
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com