Re: [WAY OT] Parenthese, was Re: [gentoo-user] I can RTFM, but can I understand it: re elog messages

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

Apparently, though unproven, at 19:07 on Friday 20 August 2010, Mike Edenfield 
did opine thusly:

> On 8/20/2010 11:40 AM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> > As to the thingies, I enjoyed discovering that to many people a
> > parenthesis is not a glyph or punctuation mark, but instead the contents
> > of the language set aside in one way or another.  I had always regarded
> > parentheses as the round glyphs (), but this turns out to be normative
> > primarily in mathematics, computer programming languages and similar
> > fields.  But I find several competing meanings and sources using
> > http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=parenthesis&ia=luna
> > <http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=parenthesis&ia=luna>
> 
> In American English usage, the three forms of puncutation mark have
> distinct names.  Contrary to previous assertions, these names are not
> informal; authoritative American English dictionaries like M-W define
> "bracket", "brace", and "parenthesis" separately as punctuation marks.
> 
> In British English they're all called "brackets", e.g. square, curly, or
> round.

Yuck. Too many times I've had someone dictate text and this happens:

Them: <blah> <blah> open bracket <blah> <blah> ....
Me:   Which bracket?
Them: huh?
Me:   You said open bracket. What kind of bracket?
Them: Curly?
Me:   You mean brace.
Them: Yes, that's the one! Is that what it's called then?

Way too many words. Just give the bloody thing a name.

Like Eskimo's with 20+ words for different kinds of snow.
Say "snow" to any Eskimo, see what happens :-)




> 
> The Romance languages are somewhat varied, but they mostly use the Greek
> word parenthesis to derive their term for () marks; in some cases, that
> word is use for *all* brackets; in other cases [] and {} have separate
> terms:
> 
> () = parenthèses (Fr.), paréntesis (Sp.), parentesi tonde (It.)
> [] = crochets (Fr.), corchetes (Sp.), parentesi quadre (It.)
> {} = accolades (Fr.), corchetes (Sp.), parentesi graffe (It.)
> 
> For what it's worth, Unicode defines U+0028 AND U+0029 as "LEFT
> PARENTHESIS" and "RIGHT PARENTHESIS" (also "OPENING PARENTHESIS" and
> "CLOSING PARENTHESIS").
> 
> --Mike

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com