30 Jan
2013
30 Jan
'13
5:10 a.m.
On 01/29/2013 08:06 PM, Brent Hilpert wrote:
On 2013 Jan 29, at 5:36 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
Ngram is the determining authority?
Ngram is neat but it may have it's own skew to results. A new or
'in-vogue' term like midicomputer may show up more in trade rags than
published books in comparison to more established terms like
minicomputer and mainframe. Ngram says they normalise results for number
of books published in a year but it's not clear how valid comparitive
results will be are across different categories of publications.
Shrug. I'll have to check the computer dictionary that I edited back in
the 90's for McGraw-Hill.
Generally, I don't think much of dictionaries or the people who write them.
"Midicomputer" appeared in publication--by some measures, that's
sufficient to call it legitimate.
--Chuck
As I
said, it *was* the 70s. Love beads, Nehru jackets, leisure
suits and
other things were in vogue, along with orange shag carpeting, bright
primary
colors for indoor furnishings and "midicomputer".
You miss my point. "Midicomputer" was *not* in vogue. If it was, it
would have a larger presence in Ngram, especially relative to
"minicomputer" (I will exclude mainframe, as it was a far more common
word amongst non-computer people).