Re: Question on abbreviations (fwd)

At 01:31 PM 2000-12-29 -0800, William Loughborough wrote:
>
>So in summary: words need defining; who does it is still in the authors' 
>hands; it affects PWDs disproportionately; it's within scope or nobody'd 
>join the discussion.
>

Most words don't need defining.  They survive on what you remember from the
times you have encountered utterances where others used the word in the past.

Even in the case where something more is needed, 'defining' is an
overstatement
of the requirement.  Dictionaries live on _descriptions_ of the senses that
they bind to [spellings].  Definition is a special case of description.
People
tend to treat 'definitions' as precise, often more precise than is the actual
pattern of usage that the 'definition' is created to document.

So long as there's GuruNet, the matter of who provides explanations for words
is not entirely in the author's hands.  [For GuruNet, read atomica.com.  In
this age of bursting Internet bubbles, "so long as there's GuruNet" was over
before I said it, but the capability lives on.]

There are two candidate protocols for how senses get associated with words in
web content.  The author identifies the association, or the association is
made, independent of the author, by pattern matching.  We need both methods to
be fully supported by the Web technology platform,  Both methods should be
applied in practice with overlap in their domains of application.

Please stop worrying about which way we should go.  We need to go both ways.

Al

The hard thing, and the thing our terminology caucus needs as a service, is
searching the World Wide corpus of dictionaries and glossaries for _senses_
that resemble the _sense_ we want to capture and use in our literature. 
"Matching on the sign" is available for free from competing sources.  Matching
on the sense is what is happening under lock and key in the technology labs of
highly speculative capital investment.

Received on Friday, 29 December 2000 20:50:46 UTC