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Comment by mootothemax | Hacker News Reader

I've heard coders of all abilities say orientated and oriented, and was under the impression they were interchangeable.

One that I have heard repeatedly is MySequel from the Windows devs, and S-Q-L Server from the other side :)

This is something I wonder about a lot - I'm mostly self-taught, and every once in a while I still get blindsided by the pronunciation of a word I've never heard spoken.

There were a lot of home-schoolers where I went to college. You could always tell them because they had very large vocabularies (which they used correctly) but pronounced everything phonetically.

Wouldn't they get the right pronunciation from their parents? Home schooling != being locked in a basement for 18 years with a few textbooks, after all.

Arrangements for home-schooling varies but one common thread is that kids do a lot of reading and writing but not as much speaking so pronunciation slips through. It's just a result of the circumstances.

For quite a few years I was under the impression that there was a verb "misle" whose past tense was misled. [even though I wasn't home-schooled]

I started as a Linux admin, and moved on to development, and I usually pronounce it "mysequel", though I use "postgres que ell" or just "postgres".

Same here, but I'd like to see someone try to pronounce it 'postgresequal.' More likely it'll come out 'postgrequal.'

I've heard people use "post-greh-sequel".

I started in the Windows world and moved over to Linux (when I have the choice). I've always called them "My ess queue ell" and "Ess queue ell server", respectively. I actually have to stop myself from cringing when co-workers refer to 'seequel server" because it sounds so awkward.

I started with PHP/MySQL a few years ago and pronounced it My-S-Q-L. Having only read on web and in book the word, it was only after I began my current position as an ASP.NET/MSSQL developer did I begin hearing it pronounced Sequel. When I started the position, I was actually told that pronouncing it M-S-S-Q-L would result in the entire IT department pegging me as a novice.

I still use S-Q-L.

This is one that still irritates me, and heard it misused (by non-windows dev) just this past weekend at a conference. Sequel is a product, S-Q-L is the language.

Of course, this has been going on for awhile. http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=s...

They are interchangeable: http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutgrammar/orie...

I personally used "oriented" - why use a longer word when a shorter one is precisely equivalent? Also, I'm used to it.

Oh, it is called "Sequel Server" within Microsoft, but Wikipedia says "S-Q-L" for the language. Strange... I remember it saying "sequel" some time ago. Is the received pronunciation now C-O-B-O-L too?

My experience is, in the US they say "s-q-l" in academia and "sequel" in industry. YMMV.

That's interesting. In my experience, people who have been around it a long time (say, 20+ years) tend to use "sequel". The younger of my colleagues generally use "S-Q-L".

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