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Comment by HighChaparral | Hacker News Reader

I got really worried when he pronounced AUTOEXEC as AUTO-E-X-E-C. I realised it's one of those things I rarely, if ever, heard said out loud and so this weird panic came over me that maybe I was saying it wrong all this time.

Luckily, later in the video, he called it AUTO-EXEC (as in an executive). Panic over.

Great video, however you pronounce it.

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My jimmies get rustled with people say; AMI as Amy, CLI as cly (rhymes with fly), or /etc as E-T-C....

I heard someone spell out /usr once, still haven’t fully recovered.

EDIT forgot about bin pronounced bine (rhymes with pine)

How about lib? I’ve heard that one commonly pronounced as lib in liberal would be, but one coworker said it like the lib in library would be, which makes more sense but sounds bizarre!

Lib is short for library in every day speech, as well, and pronounced "lib" not "lyb".

What camp do you fall into for Structured Query Language? I'm an SssQueEl purist (it's an acronym not an abbreviation) who bristles when I hear (the far more common) Sequel.

I use it daily and say each letter - everyone else I work with says Sequel.

This all stems from when I originally learnt it 20 odd years ago and read something on the web that proclaimed S-Q-L was correct, and "Sequel" referred specifically to the Microsoft implementation.

(The irony is not lost on me that having started working with MySQL, then Oracle, I've now ended up working daily with SQL Server and so I'm wrong by my own definition, which I probably took as gospel erroneously in the first place!)

Also S.Q.L - but it’s an Initialism, not an Acronym (the latter being pronounceable as words eg NASA).

(Re Doom) To my shame “ID Software” was always I.D not Idd, though! - don’t know how common that was.

ID Software is "Idd" though, isn't it? That was recently confirmed by Tom Hall on Reddit. He came up with the name.

I believe it is. And it's lower case as well!

id Software

Squirrel

That train kind of left the station. With "SQL", you can either try to be correct (and use both in different cases), or to be consistent (and accept you will pronounce some actual product names incorrectly), or — I suppose — to choose chaos (give up, don't care and just choose one at random at any new opportunity).

I think the only possible misstep here is to decide to chide someone else for choosing any of the three paths.

Squill. https://xkcd.com/1989/

S-Q-L, except for products that are pronounced with Sequel (Microsoft SQL server, MySQL, SQlAlchemy, etc.)

I pronounce it Squid Lord

I am trying and failing to find the entry in the jargon file that says something along the lines of "if you come across a person who pronounces 'SQL' as 'squirrel', you have found a true hacker indeed". Maybe it was not the jargon file. It's been many years.

Along those same lines, I also like to pronounce "varchar" in a way[1] that is guaranteed to put a look of disgust on the face of almost everyone in the room; this is how I find my karass.

[1] if anyone replies asking for specifics because they are "genuinely curious" I will slap them. Use your imagination.

It was the jargon file, but it was about SCSI, and that anybody who spelt it out was clueless.

Go ahead and slap me I guess, cuz I must not be imaginative enough.

  vare-care?
  var-car?
  v-archer?
  var-charr?
  varc-har

I don't get it, none of those seem that bad

> "if you come across a person who pronounces 'SQL' as 'squirrel', you have found a true hacker indeed"

Well, I feel oddly validated, thanks. (In the sense of "squirrelly" - counterproductively idiosyncratic or disfunctional.)

> "varchar"

> < vare-care? var-car? v-archer? var-charr? varc-har

"varker" maybe?

If you pronounce it "char" (as in the word for "to storch") instead of "care", you're as bad as the people who say "jif".

Do you mean as awesome as the people who say jif? ;-)

Always as SQL. Historically, SQL was a rename of SEQUEL [1], so there may be some people who say SQL as a word, but most people spell it. That's also how the SQL standard say to pronounce it, "S-Q-L".

But, for Microsoft's WinDbg, the correct pronunciation for those in the know is, "wind bag". [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

Microsoft SEQUEL server and My ESS-QUEUE-ELL. That's how I've always done it and same with all my coworkers even the OG data guys.

> My jimmies get rustled with people say; AMI as Amy

I hate to break it to you, but that's the canonical pronunciation that Amazon uses. You've got an uphill battle ahead of you!

What does Amazon have to do with BIOS firmware!?

Because nowadays the more common interpretation of AMI is Amazon Machine Image.

A lot more people deal with machine images than BIOS these days.

What’s an Amazon Machine Image? Did they take over American Megatrends?

Its like a VMDK or OVA or QCOW2, but Amazon's take on it.

Interesting. I’ve only heard them pronounced as A-M-I or “aa-mee” (with the a as in apple rather than as in aim), including with some friends who work at Amazon.

Yeah, I was thinking ah-me. Just not A-M-I.

How do you say "CLI"? I've only ever heard it as "rhymes with fly", though maybe someone has spelled it out once or twice ("see ell eye").

see ell eye. If I heard "cly", I wouldn't have known what they were talking about until this thread.

I did not realize humans existed who ever attempted to pronounce it.

Now mix in other language speakers pronouncing the English acronyms but while speaking their language.

Ask a German speaker to say CLI. Probably comes out something like "clee". With the C like in "corn". C makes that hard German K sound.

Depends on where in Germany. In the west most pronounce it like K. Like the the word China is pronounce Kina with a hard K. In east and north it is pronounced like a german sch like Schina. The c together with a k like in „backen“ or „lecker“ just sounds like a second „k“ („lek-ker“)

I and my colleagues all pronounce CLI the English way btw. But growing up I had a hard time with the word „cache“. I pronounced it the German way which sounded very silly.

What's wrong with a "Kesch" (er)? :)

OH you mean a "Kache" (l)?

On a related note I find both "Kina" and "Schina" sound weird. It's "China". Like in "ich".

Yes I pronounced it „Kache“. Didn‘t know better ;)

Actually it's french. Therefore "Kaschee". Nix mit Käsch inne Täsch :-)

Similar thing with Budget. Up to this day my toenails roll up when I hear it pronounced like "Badd(dj/g)ätt" instead of "Bü(dj/g)ee".

how do you talk (like actual voice not text exchange) about it otherwise?

I spell it out every time. "The C-L-I flag does foo"

In U.K. I think pretty much everyone spells it.

I've never ever heard CLI pronounced as a word but always as an acronym spelled, "see ell eye". Pronouncing as a word seems odd, like pronouncing PII as pie or IPX as epic.

I hear it a lot in sentences like "Is there a 'kly' command for it or do you have to use the 'gooey'?"

If you are saying it a lot, you pretty quickly adjust to saying a 1-syllable word, instead of saying 3 syllables, whatever your moral stance is. :)

Plus, why should "GUI" get a pronunciation but "CLI" be neglected?

> Plus, why should "GUI" get a pronunciation but "CLI" be neglected?

It's probably because the person who made the acronym or initialism had wanted it to be pronounced a certain way and chose a sequence of letters to achieve the desired result. Of course, the speakers of the letter-group will later decide when and how they will pronounce it!

  Acronym: a word formed from the initial letters
  or groups of letters of words in a set phrase or
  series of words and pronounced as a separate word [1]

  Initialism: a set of initials representing a name,
  organization, or the like, with each letter
  pronounced separately [2]

[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/acronym

[2] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/initialism

In the mid-90s, there was some controversy/discussion over how to verbalize "WWW". Very unwieldy in its spelled-out 9-syllable form! So one of my coworkers proposed "dub-three" - two syllables - so sorry it never caught on.

In my experience, non-native english speakers pronounce it as "klee". But IBM is just I-B-M (because you cannot actually pronounce it like a word). In general, if the acronym can be pronounced like a word, non-native english speakers will do so. More examples of acronyms that are pronounced like words: AMI, GUI, BIOS, ios, RAID, ROM, RAM, DIMM.

Luckily everyone around me says E-T-C, none of those "etcetera" weirdos.. :-)

I always say "ett-cee".

You just blew my mind, is that the source of the name Etsy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etsy

"Kalin said that he named the site Etsy because he "wanted a nonsense word because I wanted to build the brand from scratch. I was watching Fellini's 8 ½ and writing down what I was hearing. In Italian, you say etsi a lot. It means 'oh, yes' (actually it's "eh, si"). And in Latin and French, it means 'what if'."[43][44] In Greek, Etsy means "just because"."

In French, the T would have to be silent to be Et si, so it's not that word. There's nothing in French called ett-çi.

"ett-cee f-stab" may be my favorite vocalization of sys-admining.

f-stab... not f-ess-tab?

It’s f-stab for sure.

But it heats up more with Linux or gif.

My head almost exploded when I heard Linus Torvalds say "ioctl".

("ayoctal", but with a Finnish accent.)

Et-k

I've always called it et-cet but never really needed to utter it out loud very often. kinda just a shortening of et cetera.

numpy, clearly rhymes with lumpy :-)

‘numpty’ - it has an invisible t, the opposite of a silent t.

Here's another...

one of my co-workers says yer'll for URL. Ugh.

This is common in other languages. Pronouncing letters in English is especially tedious. "You ar el" is so oppressive to say compared to "oo rr luh" as you might in a Romance language. And both are worse than "uhrl".

Also, we don't got a problem with "bios" for BIOS. :p (Yet few people seem to use "yufi" for UEFI.)

Yufi sounds too much like "Roofie", which is what I call a Yufi that has network connectivity and is hosted on a machine with an appropriate network card.

Friends don't let friends compute on Roofied computers... Or worse, roofie their own systems!

This sounds like Ural to me. Excellent stuff.

Acronyms are actually the devil. In the medical world it’s been further optimised such that one abbreviation can mean many things. And then people ‘handwrite’ (it’s actually just scribbles) half their documentation so that you can’t read it.

If you are lucky enough to work in a service that captures things from diverse specialities the result is dark comedy.

MRA = magnetic resonance angiogram. Or magnetic resonance arthrogram.

CT = computed tomography. Or corneal transplant.

Those are just the two that caused thousands of dollars of errors in my recent memory, but it’s a daily battle working out what the hell a referral means.

Exec as in "execute", as in, "AUTOmatically EXECute these batch commands when DOS starts."

I was referring to the pronunciation, not the meaning - EXE-CUTE isn't quite right compared to EXEC-U-TIVE.

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