Double-irony of the day

[Nicholas Bodley]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2006 01:23:00 -0500, David Kramer <david at thekramers.net>  
wrote:

> they misspelled "kernel" as "kernal"

Back when Commodore was sill in business, it seems that "kernal" was their  
standard spelling. I remember calling them by phone, willing to foot the  
cost of the call, asking about it. I don't, at the moment, remember their  
reply well, but I'm fairly sure that they were quite surprised. I think it  
is considered a rare variant spelling (try the OED), but it looks wrong to  
me. However, as with "compatable" and numerous misspellings by de facto  
consensus, it seems to be part of a new dialect of Popular English  
developing in our midst. I'm coming to think that a "photographic"  
(eidetic?) memory helps considerably in spelling English.

It seems that only engineers care about letter case; there are countless  
instances of half-a-bit storage devices mentioned currently (512 mb;  
that's millibits) and CPU clock rates roughly like the frequency of a  
clock pendulum were not that rare, a few years ago -- 500 mhz (or mHz) is  
500 millihertz, half a hertz, or one tick every two seconds. A mHz is  
definitely a practical unit; some electronic test equipment for generating  
frequencies has a resolution of one microhertz, and a few devices will  
actually put out one microhertz (although it takes a while to validate  
that by conventional means!).

Regards,

-- 
Nicholas Bodley  /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
Teaching [creationism and evolution] suggests
teaching [alchemy and chemistry], as well as
[astrology and astronomy]. (Physics, though?)
(Credit to Richard Cohen, Wash. Post, 20060309)