--- Forwarded Message from Ursula Williams <[log in to unmask]> ---

>In-Reply-To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 08:39:48 -0500
>To: Language Learning and Technology International Information Forum               <[log in to unmask]>
>From: Ursula Williams <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: #5453 spelling questions

------------------
Polly, you have raised some interesting questions. I am working on a new
edition of the IALL Glossary, and will try to answer some of them. The
reason you see so many variations has to do with variations that have crept
into American English, thanks primarily to advertisers, and with the fact
that these are new terms.

DVD is probably preferable to D.V.D. these days, because using periods in
abbreviations has gone out of fashion. Most newspapers print AFL-CIO, for
example, and have for years. (When I was growing up it was A.F. of L.)
People have a tendency to pluralize these by adding an apostrophe and an s.
I don't know why that is! We're having a lot of trouble with apostrophes
these, days, so I don't know where that's going. I think it's a losing
battle, but DVDs is preferable to DVD's.  To my surprise, I saw a sign in a
store the other day that said "Digital Versatile Disk." I had assumed the V
stood for video.

Online seems to be preferable to on-line.

Internet was spelled with a capital I from the beginning. It was a large
network created for the specific specific purpose of allowing government,
educational, and research organizations, who had their own smaller
networks, to interact with each other. Hey, if the New York Times
capitalizes it, I say capitalize it!


I'm not sure I would put "scanner" on a resume, since it also refers to
those gizmos at the grocery store, which people can "operate" while
simultaneously snapping their gum and talking to two or more of their
contemporaries. Perhaps you are thinking of OCR, or Optical Character
Recognition, which is software that works with a (flatbed) scanner and
produces a page of text. Operating one of those scanners is siple. You lift
the lid and lay the page on the glass. It's using the software that gets
results.

One more thing: If you do a web search on "computer glossary" or something
similar, you will find an enormous number of online glossaries where you
can check all kinds of terms.

Don't expect them all to agree, though. This is the electronic frontier.

Ursula Williams
University of Notre Dame




>Is "internet" (Internet) capitalized?  Why or why not?  We're writing a Know
>Your Private Schools booklet for the League of Women Voters.  Some schools
>capitalized it and some schools didn't; we'd like to be consistent.  I think
>I saw that the New York Times capitalized it.
>
>As long as we are on that subject, how should I spell "on line", is there a
>hyphen, one or two words?
>
>I'm also writing a resume.  I'm trying to have a section devoted to
>technological training.  Is it dvd, DVD or D.V.D. and what exactly does that
>stand for?  On a resume, would you say "scanner" or OS -whatever?  What is
>the acronym for scanner.
>
>What is the difference between the two sides of a DVD?
>
>Thank you!
>Polly Lynn (I'm not at a university.  I'm staying at home with two babies.)