satine.org

by Charles Ying

Wuh Working Group

October 16th, 2009
cying: how is WHATWG pronounced?
cying: “what working group” ?
tantek: or “what double you gee”
Hixie: i pronounce it “whatwuhjee”
cying: Hixie: interesting… wuhjee?
tantek: Hixie, makes sense, like “wuh wuh wuh dot …”
Hixie: yeah
Hixie: or wuhwuhstyle for www-style
gavin: weird!
AryehGregor: “www” is remarkable, as an abbreviation that takes like twice as long to say as the thing it ostensibly abbreviates.
Hixie: it’s an abbreviation for writing
Hixie: not talking
Philip: AryehGregor: How do you get “twice”?
Philip: given that “w” is three syllables
AryehGregor: “like”
AryehGregor: Closer to three times, it’s true.
Philip: Two is not much like three
TabAtkins: I pronounce WHATWG as “what”+”wig”.
TabAtkins: And when pronouncing “www” I say “dub dub dub”.
TabAtkins: (A shortening of “dubya”, the texan way to pronounce that letter.)
• Philip pronounces WHATWG as “what”+mumble, because he never actually says it out loud and in his own brain he doesn’t need to pronounce the entire word to know what he’s thinking of
TabAtkins: I pronounce all of my acronyms as words. HTML is “heh teh mul”, CSS is “sess es”, etc.
Philip: TabAtkins: You’re weird
Philip: I thought everyone said “HTML” as four letters
TabAtkins: Philip: I save a syllable, and the leftover syllables are easier to say quickly too.
Philip: TabAtkins: If the primary requirement is saving syllables, you could just grunt
TabAtkins: But then other people don’t have a chance of understanding me. Plus my language organ isn’t trained to recognize or produce meaningfully grunting beyond the existing near-primal sounds we all make.

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