Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 June 20

= June 20 =

When did we stop putting full stops in initialisms?
When (in which decade) did we stop putting full stops in initialisms, so that P.O.W.s became POWs and the B.B.C. became the BBC? Thanks --catslash (talk) 00:48, 20 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I doubt if you will find a specific decade, more likely a slow (and still ongoing) process. StuRat (talk) 01:26, 20 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes, it's been happening for a very long time (BBC seems to be missing full stops even in 1930), but it varies with different initialisms and different conventions in different countries. The trend is strongly in the direction of omitting full stops, but they are occasionally still seen.  I was taught to put a full stop after Mr, but this was discouraged in typing classes in the 1970s and 1980s.    D b f i r s   07:40, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * The "blocked style" of typing, taught in the 1970s and probably from the 1960s, cut out the stops along with indented paragraphs, centered headings, and other fripperies. Typing-pool Taylorism. Itsmejudith (talk) 09:01, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that's what I was thinking of. Did it really start as early as the 1960s?    D b f i r s   11:14, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * It also depends very much on who "we" are. Roger (talk) 14:38, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I have some history with IBM and I don't think I've ever seen any full stops in that particular initialism. And that company dates back to 1911.  Dismas |(talk) 14:44, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Actually, the association between omitting stops in abbreviations and "blocked style", "block style", "block form", "block format" etc. is not as clear as I thought. I've found "English for Secretaries" online, an American book of 1944, which uses stops for all people's initials, and also describes the "block format" of letter with all paragraphs aligned to the left, and "open punctuation" in addresses, meaning no comma at the end of each line of the address. Still, both are part of a general trend towards simplicity, fitting with Taylorist notions of efficiency. Itsmejudith (talk) 15:29, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I found a "snippet view" of a (possibly American?) book called Simplified Library School Rules from 1904 which says "open punctuation, characterized by the avoidance of all pointing not clearly required by the construction, now prevails in the best English usage. In some cases, as in certain legal papers, title-pages, etc. punctuation is wholly omitted." Alansplodge (talk) 21:28, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Shifting accents in Spanish? (hidalguía)
In a book (early 20th century, in English, about Argentina, and referring here to the 18th or 19th centuries), I came across "hidalguiá"; the standard form today is clearly hidalguía. There are however a few references to the former on Google, primarily older works. Are these just typos, or could an accent have shifted from one syllable to another in the development of the language?

As a bonus question, the book also refers to "carne cum cuero"; again, could "cum" be a real word (perhaps influenced by Portuguese "com"?). HenryFlower 10:38, 20 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I assume you're referring to Argentina by W. A. Hirst. This book is riddled with elementary errors. It's not surprising that the author relies on French sources, because his Spanish is terrible. He almost never puts an accent where one is required: he writes stuff like "Garcia", "Maria", "cancion", "critica", "pais", "nacion", etc. On the same page as "carne cum cuero", there are two instances of "payadors" instead of "payadores". That's such a basic error, it makes me think that he hasn't taken a single Spanish lesson in his life.


 * Even disregarding the author's ignorance, you can be sure that "hidalguiá" is not an archaic form of "hidalguía". As far back as classical Latin, the -īa suffix has carried the stress on the I. Other than proper nouns, the only Spanish words ending in "-uiá" are the vos-form imperatives of "esquiar" and "guiar". If "hidalguiar" were a verb, then "hidalguiá" would be its V-imperative. To my knowledge the only verb derived from "hidalgo" is "hidalgarse", and its V-imperative is "hidalgá". But this speculation is giving Hirst too much credit. Given his obvious ignorance of Spanish, it's reasonable to assume that "hidalguiá" is a common word misspelled rather than an incredibly rare word that he managed to spell properly.


 * "Carne cum cuero" is a hypercorrection. It's astonishing, given the author's ignorance of Spanish, that he felt qualified to write an entire book about a Spanish-speaking country. He even opines on the merits of Argentine poetry. L ANTZY T ALK 20:01, 20 June 2012 (UTC)


 * If you're referring to the same digitised version of this book as I just found via Google, might I suggest that some or all of the errors are actually OCR errors. There are also weird errors in some of the English text. For example, the text declares itself to have been "Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation". It would seem this should be Microsoft, but a capital M has ended up as IVI. Many of what apparently should be currency symbols have ended up as short strings of punctuation such as ";^" and what should apparently read 1 s. 9 d. (i.e. 1 shilling, 9 pence) has ended up as is. gd. These are just a few errors I noticed from looking at a few random pages. The normally punctuated and capitalised English text is mostly fine, but a number of words all in capitals are misrendered (TONNAGE becomes TONNAGK, FACING becomes FACIKG, WOKING (the town) becomes WCKINC). This would suggest some form of OCR software with a built-in English dictionary was used. This renders standard English more or less correctly (with the occasional misreading) but would struggle with uncommon or defunct currency notations or with non-English words. In addition to the Spanish "errors" there are several French works in the bibliography where, for example, the article before a noun is rendered as I' rather than l', which is not a mistake any editor would allow to pass repeatedly. (By the way other supposed errors are not necessarily errors. "Payadors" is only incorrect if you assume that the author treats "payador" as a foreign word that requires a foreign plural. The English plural of matador - for example - is matadors, not matadores ). Valiantis (talk) 23:30, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Ignore the above. I just found a PDF of the (1914 edition of the) book and the errors Lantzy refers to are in that too. Whilst I stand by my point about the pluralisation of words in general, as the text itself italicises "payadors", it's hard to argue that it was not intended to be understood as a foreign word with a foreign plural. Valiantis (talk) 23:54, 20 June 2012 (UTC)


 * It reminds me of "English As She Is Spoke". --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  08:30, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks all. It is indeed the same book as on archive.org (a later printing, but with the same spelling errors). I'm not convinced the missing accents and English plurals count as error in an English book, but it's nice to know that these two are. HenryFlower 11:08, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning and ???
Reasoning from the general to the special is called deduction, and reasoning from the special to the general is called induction, but what is the name for reasoning from the special to the special?

For example, "All men are mortal, and I am a man, so I am mortal" is deduction. "All men born more than 150 years ago are dead by now, so all men are mortal" is induction. "All men born more than 150 years ago are dead by now, so I am mortal" is what? Of course it can be reduced to induction and deduction: "All men born more than 150 years ago are dead by now, so all men are mortal, and so I am mortal too", but that is a detour.

What could it be called? The names obduction and reduction and production have been taken, but what about abduction or exduction ? Please give me some learned suggestion.

The reason why I ask is that I have developed programs for calculating mean values and standard deviations for deduction- and induction- and X-duction- problems, but I need a good program name for the latter. Bo Jacoby (talk) 10:45, 20 June 2012 (UTC).


 * Abduction is already taken (see logical reasoning for a clear comparison of it with induction and deduction, using the raining/wet grass example). benzband  ( talk ) 10:58, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Thank you very much! I agree that the concept 'abduction' is not quite what I am looking for. Another example. Suppose that I have seen ten swans and they were all white. Deduction: Each one of these swans is white. Induction: All swans are white. X-duction: The next swan I see is white. Induction and X-duction is not logically compelling, but can be quantified statistically. Bo Jacoby (talk) 12:31, 20 June 2012 (UTC).
 * Your examples seem just to constitute a particular type of induction—specifically, the type illustrated at Inductive reasoning. Note that our article says, "Though many dictionaries define inductive reasoning as reasoning that derives general principles from specific observations, this usage is outdated." Deor (talk) 14:36, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes, you are correct, but still I need a name for this special type of induction. One swan taken from ten white and no non-white swans gives 1±0 white and 0±0 non-white swans. This deduction has logical certainty. 1 deduc 10 0 1 0 0 0 Ten swans taken from ninety white and ten non-white swans gives 9.0±0.9 white and 1.0±0.9 non-white swans. This deduction has a statistical uncertainty. 10 deduc 90 10 9       1 0.904534 0.904534 Ten white and no non-white swans taken from a population of one thousand swans indicate that there are 918±76 white and 82±76 non-white swans in the population. 10 0 induc 1000 917.5   82.5 76.3475 76.3475 Ten white and no non-white swans observed indicate that among the next ten swans you will see 9.2±1.1 white and 0.8±1.1 non-white swans. 10 0 xduc 10 9.16667 0.833333 1.13699 1.13699 What should program xduc really be called? Bo Jacoby (talk) 23:18, 20 June 2012 (UTC).
 * I may be incorrect, but this sounds like predictive inference. If there is a significant difference between inference and logical reasoning, that may be incorrect.  Perhaps the program could be called Preduc?    Sazea (talk) 21:32, 22 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Swanduction? Jerk182 (talk) 22:46, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

I am grateful for your suggestions. I am now inclined to call the program 'predic' because prediction is exactly what it makes. Sometimes hard problems have trivial solutions. The word 'preduction' is a neologism, according to Google Translate. Further suggestions are still welcome. Bo Jacoby (talk) 08:13, 23 June 2012 (UTC).

very strange complete misspelling
I'm not sure if this is a language or a psychology question! When typing a google search query quickly I got the "suggested spelling message "do you mean paradigm shift?". On looking at what I typed I saw that I had somehow typed "padigram". What is more "padigram" gets over 6,000 hits. Why would I, and so many other people, get a word so completely wrong? -- Q Chris (talk) 13:50, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * The QWERTY keyboard may be to blame. Roger (talk) 14:02, 20 June 2012 (UTC)


 * "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe." Also padigram seems a reasonable English word, by analogy with lots of words ending "-igram", and add the rareness of the "-gm" ending in English, and you have a mis-reading that appears plausible and isn't too noticeable.  If you've only seen a word rarely and don't exactly remember it, it's natural to fit together the letters in what seems the most plausible order. --Colapeninsula (talk) 14:16, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * The first part of your response has been disproven. It only works with easy words and under certain circumstances, which Snopes seems to acknowledge. It's also obvious from the fact that I can't make any sense of "padigram". 92.80.10.126 (talk) 14:37, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * A telegram from Ireland? Tonywalton Talk 22:47, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * If you click the 10th page in the Google results then it reports there are only 76 results. Many of the rest may be different url's with the same content, or just Google counts being odd. The latter is quite normal and they do say "About" in their counts. For performance reasons they make some guesses. Many of the 76 are also copies, for example of "Chiropractors Expect A Padigram Shift" from http://www.sooperarticles.com/health-fitness-articles/back-pain-articles/chiropractors-expect-padigram-shift-117422.html. There are also non-errors like "Padi, Gram", and possible non-errors like the username Padigram. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:32, 20 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I notice that your misspelling can be understood as a single transposition of ra and dig. It could be that your muscle-memory program for typing paradigm consists of subprograms "type pa, type ra, type dig, type m" and your timing got muddled. —Tamfang (talk) 22:02, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Brilliant! μηδείς (talk) 04:10, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
 * This seems likely. I have been looking at a number of typos I make and they are not just simple transpositions of adjacent characters, for example I wrote "spam" as "smap". -- Q Chris (talk) 09:41, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
 * See metathesis. μηδείς (talk) 04:10, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
 * There are a few words it always takes me at least 2 goes to get right, such as "niece" and "weird". I'm pretty much OK with most -ei- and -ie- words because I had the "I before E except after C" rule and its exceptions drummed into me.  But despite having 4,839 times gone through the process of typing "neice", thinking it didn't look quite right, trying "niece", still thinking it didn't look quite right, checking the dictionary, and discovering for the 4,839th time that "niece" is correct, I still start out with "neice" every single time.  I just don't seem to be able to help it.  And weird - there are only 4 common words that start out wie- (wield, Wiener) or wei- (weir, weird), so how hard can it be to remember which are in each camp?  Too hard for me, apparently,  Lucky I don't have a weird niece.  And "interpret" - my first attempt is always "intepret", then I have to correct it because I actually know the correct spelling.  So why do I always start out wrong?  It's got me beat.  --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  22:28, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Maybe remember that "niece" and "piece" have the same orthography. I can't think of anything to work for "weird", though. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:49, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * My bugbear is "veicle". Or rather "vehicle". I find watching Judge Judy helps with my spelling there, though, as the 1% of complainants who don't have a "trerk" outside their mobile home will have a "vee-hickle". "Niece" looks wrong whichever way I spell it, as does "liaison", and I'd spelt "opprobrium" as "opprobium" all my life until someone pointed it out. As for "Wiener" that's easy. Just remember that in German you pronounce the second letter in an "ei" or "ie" combination. So "Wiener", "weener", "Bier", "beer" but "Wein" "wine"" or "frei", "fry" (meaning "free", so "Freies Bier" is "Fryes Beer", always a good thing). Tonywalton Talk 22:59, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * How odd it is that only "hicks" say it "ve-hicle". The "Wiener" rule, at least as said in English, works for "niece" and "piece" also. Although I think "Wiener" (meaning "of Vienna") would be more like "vee-enner" in German, and "bier" more like "bee-er". The "Wein" rule also works for "mein" (mine), "deine" (thine), etc. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:14, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I never get wield, Wiener or weir wrong; and even though I've never studied German formally, I know the German spelling rule, so I don't confuse Lied (song) with Leid (sorrow), or Lieb (love) with Leib (life). It's only "weird" that trips me up.  I must remember to start out with weir and just add a d.  --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  23:51, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Wiener is "VEEner" and Bier is "beer", approximately. No extra syllables there. 92.80.52.54 (talk) 08:09, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I almost always type "there" for "their" and "they're", and usually think "forment", "olnly" and "uninted" for "foment", "only," and "united". (But never spell them that way.)  At least I don't say "aks", "warsh", "pixture" or "nucular" like one of my exes until.  Mr. Weir was my first boss, so I don't get that wrong.  And wierd simply looks weird, although it sounds write.  But I have recently put on "heirs" instead of "airs".  Anglice scribere is such fun. μηδείς (talk) 04:08, 22 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I don't know if this will help with spelling, but the origin of "weird" is kind of interesting: ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:10, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
 * See for instance this or this (para 11). Or this. Tonywalton Talk 18:06, 23 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Hmm. I don't think I'll be "dreeing my weird" in polite company, but thanks anyway.  --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  20:48, 23 June 2012 (UTC)