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Comment by The_Colonel | Hacker News Reader

> and usage of "Hapsburg" should have been corrected and obsoleted by now.

Seems like a classic confusion about the difference between is and ought.

You believe that it should be obsoleted, but it is not obsoleted. Even the link you provided has no mention of the term Hapsburg being obsoleted, so I still have to wonder what you meant by "look it up".

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Well, just from the Merriam-Webster entry linked above, plus Wikipedia: It's been spelled out as "Habsburg" since late 13th century. Just because around 1861 someone misspelled it as "Hapsburg" does not mean we should perpetually repeat this error.

You know how this works: human life is short, and our memory is even shorter, so it takes just one uneducated idiot to make a spelling mistake, then dozen of other idiots to repeat it, and after hundred years the mistake becomes a time-honored tradition.

As the purpose of communication is to communicate, language ends up being descriptive rather than prescriptive — as frustrating as that can be to the more precise among us (believe me I feel your pain).

Or to put it in tech terms: language is a blockchain.

Language in general: yes, you're right, it's about communication, so it can be a little fuzzy. But for family names it's all about unambiguously identifying a person. "Habsburg" and "Hapsburg" might as well have been two unrelated families, not different spellings of the same name. So, the precision matters here.

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