I recently presented a series of introductory
webcasts on ASP.NET 2.0 for MSDN, and I received several comments in the feedback on my pronunciation of "URL" as "Earl". One commenter said it was distracting because he thought of "Earl" as the guy that was killed in the Dixie Chick song :) Interestingly I never pronounce URI or URN, but always spell them out.
It's always interesting to see how the pronunciation of acronyms evolves in different circles, I'm sure there's a fascinating linguistic study to be done on the topic. The classic acronym pronunciation war is of course "GUID" which is either "gooid" or "guid - rhymes with squid" (as footnoted in
Essential COM by
D. Box). You can quickly identify a programmer's heritage by asking him/her to pronounce this acronym :)
I also received comments (positive actually) on my pronunciation of the punctuation characters "~" and "/" as "tilde" and "whack" respectively. As in, "set the earl to tilde whack foo-dot-aspx". Makes me reminisce to a class in college on Scheme where the instructor pronounced "!" as "Bang!" accompanied by a strong contact between the chalk and the chalkboard to emphasize the character - it kept everyone awake at least...
I though I'd post a short pronunciation guide for acronyms I commonly use, in case you hear me talk some time, you can use this guide to decode what I'm saying :)
URL - "Earl"
GUID - "rhymes with squid"
WSE - "wuzzie"
XAML - "zamel"
XBap - "X-bap" (
Ian just taught me this one)
GAC - "gack"
WSDL - "wuzdle"
And punctuation pronunciation:
~ - "tilde"
/ - "whack"
! - "bang"
. - "dot"
# - "hash" (not "pound" in order to avoid confusing Brits), sometimes "octothorpe"
Feel free to post additional acronym pronunciations, or discrepancies with the ones I've posted, in comments (dot) I'd love to hear about them (bang)
Posted
Apr 04 2006, 07:45 AM
by
fritz-onion