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Apparently, though unproven, at 19:07 on Friday 20 August 2010, Mike Edenfield |
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did opine thusly: |
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|
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> On 8/20/2010 11:40 AM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote: |
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> > As to the thingies, I enjoyed discovering that to many people a |
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> > parenthesis is not a glyph or punctuation mark, but instead the contents |
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> > of the language set aside in one way or another. I had always regarded |
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> > parentheses as the round glyphs (), but this turns out to be normative |
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> > primarily in mathematics, computer programming languages and similar |
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> > fields. But I find several competing meanings and sources using |
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> > http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=parenthesis&ia=luna |
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> > <http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=parenthesis&ia=luna> |
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> |
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> In American English usage, the three forms of puncutation mark have |
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> distinct names. Contrary to previous assertions, these names are not |
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> informal; authoritative American English dictionaries like M-W define |
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> "bracket", "brace", and "parenthesis" separately as punctuation marks. |
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> |
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> In British English they're all called "brackets", e.g. square, curly, or |
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> round. |
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Yuck. Too many times I've had someone dictate text and this happens: |
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Them: <blah> <blah> open bracket <blah> <blah> .... |
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Me: Which bracket? |
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Them: huh? |
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Me: You said open bracket. What kind of bracket? |
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Them: Curly? |
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Me: You mean brace. |
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Them: Yes, that's the one! Is that what it's called then? |
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Way too many words. Just give the bloody thing a name. |
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Like Eskimo's with 20+ words for different kinds of snow. |
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Say "snow" to any Eskimo, see what happens :-) |
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> |
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> The Romance languages are somewhat varied, but they mostly use the Greek |
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> word parenthesis to derive their term for () marks; in some cases, that |
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> word is use for *all* brackets; in other cases [] and {} have separate |
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> terms: |
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> |
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> () = parenthèses (Fr.), paréntesis (Sp.), parentesi tonde (It.) |
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> [] = crochets (Fr.), corchetes (Sp.), parentesi quadre (It.) |
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> {} = accolades (Fr.), corchetes (Sp.), parentesi graffe (It.) |
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> |
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> For what it's worth, Unicode defines U+0028 AND U+0029 as "LEFT |
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> PARENTHESIS" and "RIGHT PARENTHESIS" (also "OPENING PARENTHESIS" and |
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> "CLOSING PARENTHESIS"). |
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> |
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> --Mike |
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-- |
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alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |
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