'W' Considered Harmful | Hacker News Reader

'W' Considered Harmful

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34 pointssantigepigon46 comments

Let's make a movement to call W "wub". It uses its own sound, it is one syllable, and it sounds like "dub" (as in "double U"). As a bonus side effect, "www" will sound like dubstep.

i love it. very easy transition from dub dub dub

Can this be like Soda vs Pop?

We can get the dubs and wubs together and have a rave.

I think this fits better than 'dub dub dub' for web addresses

Wait a minute, there are significant backward-compatibility concerns to be addressed before we shorten the pronunciation of "W". How will we fill the extra two syllables in the ABC song?

Maybe we can enunciate L-M-N-O-P instead of running them all together?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0r8egBvWRM&feature=youtube_...

the only letter whose name doesn’t include the sound it makes

I'm trying to figure out if the author pronounces H with a Tom Brokaw "haitch" or an Elvis Presley "aitchuhh".

And, of course, w's name does contain one of the vowel sounds that w forms (the long u), just like y's does (the long i). Neither of those letters name contains their own consonant sound.

Wait, when does 'w' make the sound [u] (as opposed to [w] or [ʊ])?

Yes, because there's two of them.

cwm?

If you allow it to be assisted by another letter (as we must in the case of Q), "few" rhymes with "you".

…the abbreviation www requires nine syllables to say…

Not if you regroup the us to 'sextuple-u'.

3 yew squared

That would be nine.

It has always annoyed me that "world wide web" is significantly faster to say than "www".

Yes but is great fun seeing people say out web address's. Ah the early days when they spelt out the http:// part as well.

If it was realy a bother though somebody would of pulled a Prince and called it squiggle.

ALl this though is based upon English use of the letter W, sure other languages have there own quirks and idiosims.

* Would have pulled a Prince

Completely off topic here, but why is it that people some times write "would of" instead of "would have"? Is it something you would use in spoken language? And where?

Would have is abbreviated "would've", which is pronounced similarly. I expect people get it from hearing that before seeing it written.

You may very well be right. I use it without thinking and with that I suppose it is a form of slang variation in usage. Though my grammer and spelling are below par and I do find my native English language a fun feild of rules with so many exceptions that if it was code it would be the worst code ever. That and even today we still do not have a definitive grammer/spell checker that can understand all context and usage. Yet we can put a man on the moon and develop advanced AI that gets better every day.

Though I'm starting too feel that you may be right in how this permutation of words originated, given language accents and localisations pre internet days.

Thanks. If you also use it in speech, then it strongly suggests that it's simply because would've sounds similar to would of. To humour me, would you mind saying where you're from?

England, East Anglia

Makes sense, I suppose. I was wondering if there was more to it (E.g. a cultural artefact), but I suppose not then.

Good question and I'll put it down to my constant logic fight with English (my native language though it is most illogical for people with aspergers) and I would also admit this is what I say. With that it could be deemed slang usage perhaps. But a valid question and something I'm now going to be more mindful about, though I still have no golden answear as too why it comes about.

Personally I try to make most of my servers work without the www. part, it's also a hassle to type.

The National Association Of W Lovers is not going to be happy about this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkiCTDcV51k

Well, aren't they always unhappy about something, anyways?

thats why i just say dub dub dub for www. There couldnt be a worse standard subdomain. Also great article.. if you are interested in measuring words and speech, we should talk ;)

Actually, I hold the opposite opinion, and there are a few reasons why I think "www" is probably the best choice.

1. Communicating it by phone or radio is unmistakable. Have you ever had to spell things out for people over the phone? It's awful, even when using the NATO phonetic alphabet. Abandon all hope if you have to relay case sensitive camel-case directory paths, class names or passwords. This is why I always encourage the use of underscores, particularly with table names. EM-AS-IN-MARE-EE-UNN-DER-SCORE-PEE-AS-IN-PAUL over the phone just flows, when the person on the other end tries to reconstruct your words, but having to say CAP-EE-TAL-BEE-AS-IN-BOY-LOW-ERR-CASE-VEE-AS-IN-VIC-TOR feels as cumbersome as being a Cherokee code talker, and you repeat yourself like five times, restarting in the middle, pausing, and then repeating end-to-end, the same confusing sequences of letters, over and over again. WAIT, ALL CAPITAL??? NO. WHICH IS LOWER-CASE??? ALL ONE WORD OR WITH SPACES??? WHAT'S A KUMQUAT???

2. It's better than EIGHTCH-TEE-TEE-PEE-KOH-LONN-SLASH-SLASH

3. The best defaults are always optional, changable things that no one wants for themselves.

4. It's highly specific and unique to the internet. And even the most inept people can tell the difference between an e-mail address and a website, if you include the dub dub dub subdomain as an optional prefix. This is invaluable, when trying to inform non-technical people about your new thing on the interwebs. (..."oh, just go to www.intarderp.ly.io" sparks less confusion in the uninitiated than "intarderp.ly.io" might)

You may want to join this movement: http://www.www.extra-www.org

Save a syllable: trip-dub.

Which sounds like it could be a rather appealing genre of music.

Wub-wub-Wub-wub in the sky with diamonds.

This makes me wonder how confusing it must be for Bassant's Removals & Storage to explain their website URL over the phone...[1]

[1] http://www.doubleyoudoubleyoudoubleyou.com/

Or slashdot.

Just give it a more efficient name. In German it's referred to as [veː].

German efficiency at work

German has its own three-syllable letter: Y. It's pronounced similar to "ipsilon."

German. Efficiency.

That's more or less already the pronounciaton for V in English.

We do this in Sweden too. WWW is pronounced VVV and the car manufacturer is pronounced BMV.

"wubba wubba wubba dot google dot com"

Also, the Latin alphabet is used by many languages, in which other letters have more than one syllable: off the top of my head, Spanish has many (not to mention things they count as letters that we don't), and French has i grec for y.

F, H, J, L, M, N, Ñ, R, S, V, W, X, Y, Z (and Y is also i griega here). Those are the letters whose name has more than one syllable: more than half of them. In particular, W has four syllables (U-ve do-ble). So please stop whining, English speakers all over the world :).

On a side note, the article's comments mention something very important: the "www" didn't originate in an English-speaking country, so it's not that is "harmful" because someone didn't think it properly; instead, it's "harmful" in English because it just wasn't thought with that language in mind.

Who would worry with 'W'?

What's more is that 'W' (and 'M') mess up every compact monospaced font.

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