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Comment by pyuser583 | Hacker News Reader

I once had an insanely important job interview where I pronounced “fstab” as “F Stab” not “FS Tab.”

I care zero, it's still "F stab" to me. And URL is "earl". But despite favoring the short version for those two, I always spell out every letter of SQL, and pronounce etc as "et cetera". None of it is consistent or rational and it doesn't matter because pretty much all of the time people know exactly what you mean. Perhaps I was lucky that one of my first bosses who'd been using UNIX since the 80s pronounced vi like the first two letters in violin. First and only guy I ever met who said it that way, but we all still knew what he meant.

Nowadays, vi is pronounced “vim”.

The latest pronunciation is "n'vim". Cf "n'wah".

I’m glad they corrected me, because I hadn’t realized the “fs” was short for file system.

I still don’t know what “-tab” is about, but it’s used a lot in /etc. Maybe because the file formats use \t as separators?

I think tab and table come from the same root. Tab stops existed on typewriters prior to tab keys on terminal keyboards, and I presume it was a shortening of tabulation stop, i.e. a way to more easily input data in a tabular form or a table. So I always internally read fstab as "file system table" and crontab as "chronology table", or something similar.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tabulate

I once worked with someone who pronounced SQL files as "squalls". That was the weirdest and most creative pronunciation I've heard.

In the 80's I worked with a guy who had a theory that most people who grew up with SQL in the early days pronounce it "sequel", and the younger generation was more used to saying it as the letters; S-Q-L.

At $PREVIOUSJOB I worked with a guy from Boston who pronounced "query" as "quarry". But he had a lot of bizarre pronunciations, so we just let it go. And not just because Boston, either.

AFAIR when SQL was introduced there were rumors that IBM decided to use SQL for its name because there was another language called Sequel. So they used an acronym (full name was Structured Query Language).

At one job I had at all agreed that 'Sequel' was dumb and 'Squirrel' would have been better.

I tend to pronounce it “squeal” myself.

And IRC is irk

You should not feel any shame at being the victim of *nix's anarchic names.

I can still recall, with Proustian clarity, my feelings upon learning 'cat' and, simultaneously, that it stood for 'concatenate': "but surely in 99% of cases you are 'catting' a single file, so that name makes no sense". Was I wrong? I was not.

Reminds me of the brain fart I had one day looking at a ps output that had line wrapped and wondering what the heck the "c lock" process was. I felt foolish about ten seconds later.

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