Hi, English isn’t my mother tongue so I was asking myself that question since I first encounted a w/… Back then I was like: “What tf does ‘w slash’ stand for?” And when I found out I was like “How, why, and is it any intuitive?” But I never dared to ask that until now
All in all, the / is just one style of abbreviation used in English. It’s not only used for “with”, but also a few other words (w/o = without, N/A = not applicable).
In German we abbreviate using a dot (e.g. “m.” = “mit” = "with). That’s not more or less intuitive, it’s just what you are used to.
What’s kinda special with English is that there are multiple abbreviation styles. Off the top of my head I can think of six styles:
m. is not a German abbreviation for mit, afaik. I never once read that. Where did you get that from?
As an Austrian, I have often seen it on food packaging with limited space. Something like “Rotkraut m. Apfel”.
That is interesting. Thanks.
In programmer lingo we’ll sometimes shorten words with the number of letters in between:
i18n (internationalization) and L10n (localization). I just learned of g11n (globalization), too.
True, forgot about that one. I really hat this style of abbreviation^^
F3d i0t f1r y1u.
Aaarg!!
You’ll be a hero at work when your coworkers see how efficient your commit messages have become.
you h2e it?
Also k8s for Kubernetes.
Wait. That is why it’s called i18n!? Never knew that.
This one is terrible IMO. A11y is ironically very inaccessible unless you’re aware of this unintuitive system.
Now that I know it though, it’s a good way to distinguish between similar common abbreviations. For instance I know you don’t mean “Actually” even though I’m not sure what you do mean by A11y.
r13y (reproducibility)
I’m a programmer but fuck I hate this so much.
Just start using it for everything and confuse everyone… I mean E6E
don’t forget using contractions on single words, like cont’d, pop’n (sometimes written popn)
Abbreviate using the first and then any choice of following letter that differentiates it from the other possibilities in a specific group: AL, AR, AK, AZ… MA, ME, MD, MI, MN, MS, MO, MT… WA, WI, WV, WY!
Those are initialisms, not acronyms.
Initialisms are acronyms
Don’t forget re: which means regarding or in reference to, not reply.
don’t forget x in medical settings. eg, dx is diagnose, tx is treatment, etc
Dr., Mrs., Ms. etc. are traditionally abbreviated with periods/dots but it does raise issues typing on one’s phone because autocorrect thinks it’s the end of a sentence, so sans dots is becoming more common. And there’s other examples which have never had dots, like nvm and af
X is a little special, it stands for Cross and therefore also for Christ. When illiterate medieval people had to sign documents they were told to make the sign of the Cross, since they were usually swearing
Yes, that’s how I pronounce it.
As a non-Christian, I never made that Xmas connection. It sounds cool, but I was never sure why anyone started calling that (and evidently never curious enough to go looking for an answer or even really ask, I just kinda took it as one of those things that is how it is because people are going to people).
Oddly enough, people who didn’t know that part of the history got angry “they took Christ out of Christmas!” So then people who liked the holiday but not the religion used it to do exactly that. As you say, people people.
Well, as a Christian, I wouldn’t feel bad about it because the poster is not correct. The X in Xmas does not stand for a cross, it comes from the Greek spelling of Christ which is Χριστός. The chi-rho symbol (☧) is an imposition of the first two letters (Χ and ρ) and is still commonly used to refer to Christ in some denominations.
As a bonus: if you’ve ever wondered (or not wondered) why some Christian symbolism uses a fish, ἸΧΘΥΣ (or ICTHYS) is an acronym for Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ, “which translates into English as ‘Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior’.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys) This has been used since the first century.
And that presumably is drawn as a fish in some language?
“ἰχθύς” is the ancient greek word for “fish” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ΙΧΘΥΣ
I don’t see that word used in their comment?
click on the link pls
Both Dr and Dr. are possible.
I think it’s usually the first letter(s) and the last letter(s). In older English handwritings I’ve come across M.ʳ etc. So I think that’s were those came from.
In the Speedwriting shorthand system, developed in 1924 for use with typewriter, / Is used to denote omitted sylables, so ‘with’ becomes w/ and ‘without’ becomes w/o. Here is a pretty deep guide on the precepts of Speedwriting:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Classic_Speedwriting/wiki/list108/
But shouldn’t “w/o” then be written as “w/o/”?
And “N/A” omits more than one sylable in “applicable”.
I guess it’s a grown system.
Yeah. I have no evidence that this system invented those shortcuts, they may predate it by quite a bit
Yeah, it’s really hard to pinpoint such simple inventions.
Bonus points for one of your examples being e.g. which stands for exempli gratia, translating to “for example”
Which is kinda weird in it self, because when abbreviating you not only change the words but even the language.
Hardly anyone would ever write “exempli gratia” in a normal text, and “f.e.” would also not be understandible for most people.
So in regular use, “e.g.” is practically the abbreviation for “for example”
True, but we have lots of examples of that in English, to the point where I don’t think it’s that weird. e.g., i.e., b.c., a.d., etc., and so on. What’s even weirder to me is that we have sayings in English that use words that are otherwise not used anymore. “To and fro”, “lo and behold”, “eke out”, “inclement weather” (it’s hard to even find a definition of inclement because it’s only used to describe weather), “spick and span”, “days of yore”
In German, we too have words that only survived in specific versions. What’s really weird is that we have words like that, that died out, but a specific form survived, and then the word gets re-imported from another language with a slightly different meaning.
Take for example “Rasse” (race) and “Rassismus” (racism).
In German before WW1 the word “Rasse” was used to differentiate between the locals and the neighbouring “others”. So the usage was like “the German race”, “the French race”, “the English race”, “the Jewish race” and so on. After WW2 that word just about disappeared from the German language because it was used so heavily by the Nazis and also because it had no real meaning. They also used terms like “the Human race”. So race could be anything from “speaks another language but looks exactly like me” to “species”. It was almost exclusively (except for “the Human race”) used to dehumanize the others.
But the term “Rassismus” survived and it’s meaning is about the same as xenophobia in English. Thus, if a white person from France hates everyone from Belgium, that’s racism.
In the USA on the other hand, the word “race” was used to differentiate between the white population (which came from all over Europe) and the “others”, which in this case were Africans, Native Americans, Asians and South Americans. Like with the term “Rasse”, “race” was also used to dehumanize the others. And accordingly, “racism” only applies when someone hates people of another race by the USA definition. But unlike in German, the USA was never ruled by Nazis, and thus the word “race” was never discontinued.
And now the English word “race” is getting re-imported to the German language, but with the US meaning, because there is no German meaning left.
So right now in the German language, “Rasse” means Black, White, Asian, …, while “Rassismus” can totally be against someone who is of the same “Rasse” but speaks another language or is from another country.