Scrounging - was Floating point routines for the 6809

[Fred Cisin]

>> It's amazing how isolated pockets of our cultures can be from each
>> other! "Multiple peoples divided by a common language"

On Wed, 29 Mar 2017, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> This is something that continually delights me, from the time that I was
> ridiculed by the downstate Hoosier farmers' sons for calling a green
> runner bean a "string bean".  "Those ain't string beans, they're green
> beans.  String beans are yellow."  One wonders what would have been the
> reaction if I'd referred to them as haricot beans.

SOME people insist that "haricot beans" are navy beans or Boston beans!

> Or the time an English co-worker related the story surrounding her
> initial job interval in the US.  She described the stunned look on the
> face of the desk clerk at the local Holiday Inn when she asked to be
> knocked up at 7:30 the next morning.

British V American/"Colonial"? idioms are not surprising.
What's more surprising are the mutually exclusive variations within a 
country.


> It's a wonder that we can communicate so well between continents on this
> list in spite of regional differences.  It used to be that there were
> very substantial differences in the vocabulary used by different
> manufacturers (cf. "Label" vs. "VTOC") but that seems to have
> standardized greatly now.

Some manufacturers seemed to go out of their way to AVOID using the same 
terms as their competitors.  Even on stuff as simple as a disk space 
allocation unit.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com