sunday, march 02, 2003
yerp is allergic to yaks
i (or the linguist gnawing away inside of me) am annoyed and fascinated by the abbreviation i18n for internationalization.
my first instinct is to try to pronounce it in pseudo-leetspeak. maybe i spend too much time on irc and around teenagers, but “i18n” looks as if it sounds like “elate-in”. this almost makes sense: the “nternationa” part is cut out and the “zation” part is slurred into “eighten” and if both the i and the l turn into ones readability suffers so the l is chosen and there isn’t any standard leetspeak for n…and we get i18n.
these i18n’ers didn’t seem insane (or immature) to me though, and so there had to be another explanation. google time!
The term “i18n” is derived from its spelling as the letter “i” plus 18 letters plus the letter “n”.
that’s the first paragraph of this explanation of il8n’s origin. wow. so it’s not leetspeak; it’s a numeronym! not too scalable or intuitive, but i hadn’t heard of these, and new = neato.
Real men never define acronyms; they understand them genetically.
(from how to write unmaintainable code)
mister boyfriend says it doesn’t matter what an acronym stands for as long as you know what it means.
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