zlacker

Faster to say, and that's how I learned it in 1992.

This is one of those "jif" v. "gif" holy war issues. (Maybe "etc" is a minor skirmish rather than a full blown war.)

>>IvyMik+(OP)
Faster to say

A poor excuse for advancing illiteracy in both the linguistic and operational spaces. It's faster to say, but you've also made it harder for the lay person to understand. This sort of user hostility is a general problem in Linux; we are long since liberated from the days of unreliable teletype links, and the fetish for 3-letter contractions and abbreviated commands like cp and mv (instead of copy and move) does absolutely nothing to foster computer literacy.

>>anigbr+K
Man you really harshed the mood on what I thought was just a cute little bit of old-timey unix lore.

>>IvyMik+R1
Sorry, I didn't mean it that way. I used to love such insider knowledge as well, but over time I've become convinced that it's an anti-pattern that drives away more people than it attracts.

>>anigbr+K
Computer literacy doesn't care about linguistic literacy. Every profession has their jargon.

Passwd = "password" /usr = "slash user"

If someone doesn't understand you, then you explain and move on. But the industry has based around this jargon and removing/redefining it just creates separate standards.

>>IvyMik+(OP)
Not the best of arguments. "ets", if anything, would be even faster, and "how you learned it in 1992"? Unix V5 had an etc directory in 1974 or so (http://pdp2011.sytse.net/wordpress/pdp-11/sessions/unix-v5)

Now, if Dennis told you it was pronounced etsy, you would have a point.

>>Someon+Q11
Well, in 1992 when I learned it, it seemed like a long established and widespread practice. And I could hardly be blamed for not having a personal data point of the pronunciation when I was one years old. :)

If you look up "etc unix pronounciation", while there is a lot of bickering, I still think "etsy" is the slight majority among old timers. I will admit that this usage seems to have faded.

I spent some time trying to find video of any of the original Bell Labs Unix team actually saying the directory out loud--I couldn't find any. I'm going to keep searching, but they honestly seem to go out of their way to avoid it. I did find some fascinating videos along the way [1].

To my chagrin, there are a few oblique text references on the web that say indicate that within Bell Labs, it was pronounced "etcetera". But I'd still like a canonical reference.

[1] Like this video from 1982, including Kernighan, Thompson, Ritchie, and Aho. http://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0