Re: swiss army knife

Jens Axel Søgaard <usenet@soegaard.net> writes:

> Matthias Blume wrote: 
>
> Ditto.
>
> Example:  "a baker" vs "a Baker"

That seems completely insane to me.  Are you asserting that `baker'
and `Baker' are spelled differently?  Are you asserting that `b' and
`B' are different letters?!  DO YOU FIND THIS SENTENCE UNINTELLIGIBLE?
Do you have a dictionary with different entries for uppercase words?

Joe Marshall <jrm@ccs.neu.edu> writes:
>Do you have a dictionary with different entries for uppercase words?

IIRC, when the controversial Third Edition of the Merriam-Webster Unabridged
dictionary (as close as we come in the US to an official standard) came out,
one of its controversial features was that they switched to a format in whic
h
the boldface word at the beginning of each listing was always in lower case,
and they remarked inside the listing on whether a particular usage was
sometimes or always capitalized.  In other words, they went from
case-sensitive to case-insensitive grouping of definitions.

I think it must have come out around the time when the socially acceptable
way to refer to people in the US of African descent changed from "black"
to "Black."

So, if I'm remembering correctly, Webster's Second did have different
entries for uppercase (well, usually just the first letter uppercase)
words, but Webster's Third didn't.  I haven't been following the news
on this topic lately, so I'm not sure if there's a Fourth Edition.

(P.S.  A note for the people who've made intended-as-sarcastic remarks
about I versus eye versus aye:  The *main* controversial thing about the
Third Edition was that it included as accepted alternate spellings many
things that had formerly been considered spelling errors.  The editors'
view was that dictionaries are supposed to reflect how people actually
use the language, rather than what experts deem correct.  So a Third-like
Scheme implementation would accept near-misses to the spelling of an
identifier!)

Brian Harvey wrote:

> I think it must have come out around the time when the socially acceptable
> way to refer to people in the US of African descent changed from "black"
> to "Black."

Which, itself, is nonsensical since people of European descent are
still referred to as "white" instead of "White."

And I dunno about anybody else, but _I'm_ of european descent, but
not really white.  It's actually more a light brown, or maybe a
beige.  And I've never seen a black person, either; I've seen some
very dark brown people, but never black.

Bear