[G4] [OT] Correct English Flame War

[Doug McNutt]

OK. since you guise started it. . .

I can tolerate a lot of acronyms and other jargon, even misspellings 
like the one above which a particular friend of mine uses 
deliberately. What really bugs me is use of abbreviations which can 
actually mislead. Always define such things at the time of first 
usage.

Second person plural pronouns when the rest of the phrase is singular 
has become common and is actually made politically correct by some of 
our favorite editors. It's done to avoid the apparent sexism of 
"his" to refer to the people of planet Earth and it grates my ears 
when I see or hear it. Each of you must submit their payment by 
Friday afternoon. Pass me a scissors.

All lower case typing with  no capitals, even to start a sentence, is 
dangerous. How many times have you seen a reference to "mb" when the 
author probably meant MB for megabyte. How about use of K to mean 
either 1000 or 1024 depending on context that is rarely clear. K by 
itself is a unit of temperature as in "The noise of this receiver is 
25 K.". Proper usage for 1000, base 10, is "k" and for 1024 (10) is 
ki.

When I see "mb" I read millibar, a unit of atmospheric pressure that 
would be appropriate in  the altitude specification for a G4 which is 
only 5000 feet or so.  gb is meaningless. There really are 
international standards for Systeme Internationale, SI. Please use 
them correctly even if it means using the shift key once in a while.

Even the local newspaper suffers from a lack of proofreading. 
Misspellings are rare but wrong words set in type are often really 
spelling errors that have been "corrected" by software. By all means 
use a spelling checker but don't allow it to change words by 
correcting the wrong letter.

Just a week or so ago I had to ask our utility company just what it 
means when it calls out 300 MMBTU as an amount of natural gas. I had 
to get quite deep in the personnel structure before I found someone 
who explained that M means millia as in Roman paces so it's 1000. One 
gets a million by using two Ms which isn't even the way Roman 
numerals work. And I did know that BTU is a British Thermal Unit 
representing the amount of energy required to raise a pound of water 
one degree Fahrenheit but that hardly related to a cubic foot which 
is a more common unit of gas quantity. You're excused if you thought 
MM meant million million or Tera. The folks who pay the bills had no 
idea what the acronym meant and they saw it every day.

My G4 runs nicely on 10.3.9. That's as high as I can go because 10.4 
refuses to talk to my SE/30 file server. The King's English and MacOS 
7.5 were quality developments. We may be going the wrong way on both. 
Ubuntu on the desk to my left runs just like the  machine I used in 
the mid 70s.
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