This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,753 for Wednesday the 21st of December 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Some thoughts on numerous names.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
This summary is aka Alphanumeric acronyms, Alphanumeric abbreviations, or numerical contractions.
Hello everybody, this is Dave Morris for Hacker Public Radio.
Welcome.
I'm going to do a quick show today, I hope it's quick anyway.
We're getting very low on show, so please step up if you can.
This one is about numeronyms, the word I discovered recently, and I've called it some
thoughts on numeronyms, I'll explain what they are in a minute.
So what prompted this was a discussion with Mike Ray about accessibility, and he was using
the term A11Y, which we all were many of us were puzzled by, I certainly was.
We're pronouncing Ali and things like that, so I've been wondering about these.
These are the numeronyms, and they're built from the first letter of the word followed
by a number and the last letter, where the number represents the count of letters between
the star and int.
So accessibility is A11Y, but I found this A11Y thing very, very clunky, it's much easier
to say accessibility than it is to say A11Y.
Looked it up, just recently, found the Wikipedia article, and as I said, it's called a
numeronym, so a name with a number in it.
They may be referred to as alpha numeric acronyms, or alpha numeric abbreviations, or numerical
contractions.
And see all of those being contractually, the Wikipedia points out that these types of abbreviations
are almost always used referred to their computing sense, so G11N for globalization, and that's
in the context of computing, not in the general context.
Anyway this thing, this abbreviation method, jarred with me a little bit, and it's simply
thinking, uh, fully sympathize with the motivation behind using A11Y to mean accessibility.
I do find it odd and counterintuitive, often farmers are pondering the acceptability of
this type of abbreviation, and in other words, in common English fit patterns like this,
I wonder, quite a few I would expect.
How does this affect the admissibility of such abbreviations?
Not only they, eventually, strange to my simple brain, but I find them to be aesthetically
displeasing, my experiments with the standard Linux dictionary looking for words that fit
this pattern, I find firmatively supportive of this view, I described this experiment later.
Algebraically, it has to be expected there are many dictionary words of 13 characters
which start with A, and then with Y, looking at them allegorically, such numeronyms can
vary a little meaning except in very limited context, since the motivation seems to be
to reduce the need to type long words, alternatively if they were accepted by data entry
softer and expanded automatically, better case could be made for applicability, but only
one word could be assigned to a numeronym.
In my mind there's a certain artificiality in the use of these abbreviations.
So you might wonder what I was going on about in the last bit, strange writing, but
in sixth.
This is my admittedly small joke to try and use as many of the words that match the
A11Y pattern, which I made total sense, so there was a certain element of sense.
So I've transformed that paragraph and put A11Y in all the cases and I'm not going to
read them out, maybe I should have done, but I don't think I want to, but you can
look at it.
You send the notes and you can see what it looks like.
So being a computer programmer and enjoying writing in Bash, I had to write Bash script
to do some of this stuff.
So I've given an example, it's just a three line thing, which basically a while loop.
And what it does is it scans the file, it uses shared dick words, and picks out words
which match the A11Y pattern.
In other words, they need to start with an A and have 11 letters after that and then
a Y and then that's it.
So the little script, which is actually just a command line thing, you type in one line,
but I've laid it out.
So it's easier to read.
It writes the word that it's found and the numeronyum that's generated from it, which
it computes, so it's unnecessary in this case because they all generate the same numeronyum.
I did this way because I want to apply the algorithm to other words.
There's a process substitution, which uses grep to scan the user share, dicked words
file, and it actually removes all instances or it doesn't return in the instances that
end in a poster of the S. It seems to be quite a lot of them there, but I've said this
before, not quite sure why.
Then it pipes that result to another grep, which looks for this pattern of A followed
by 11 letters and a Y. And that is being fed into a while loop, which reads into a variable
called word.
And then the contents of word printed out using print F and then the first letter
of that word, the count of the letters in the word minus 2, and then the final letter
of the word. And this all uses bashes, quite neat, character, stream manipulation, features,
and also the ability to count the length of A of a word.
So I also wrote one, which looks for all words, which are 8 to 20 letters long.
It's 20 of those at random, and then applies this same numeranim algorithm. And it's
pretty similar, except that the process substitution at the end is, it's how different
it's looking for, words of 8 to 20 characters in length. And it uses the shuff command
to get a random selection of 20 out of this line.
I've used this trick in loads of my bash episodes, so nothing new here really.
I give an example of some of the words, non-political turns out to be N10L, and optimizations
is 11S. And so on, you know, I have fun with this if you find it amusing, it muses me,
so that's why I did that. So I'm researching for this episode, I came out upon an extremely
long word, which I found on Wikipedia, and it's a fake word. It's made up word, it's meant
to represent some sort of lung disease, but it's not the thing that actually exists.
And I'm going to try and read it, give myself a sort of crypt sheet to do it with.
But I've also linked to the spoken version of it on Wikipedia, which incidentally I disagree
with, no mind.
The way I pronounce this is numano, pertaining to your lungs, ultra microscopic, very, very
tiny, silico, relating to silicaseous dust and stuff. Volcano, relating to volcanic ash,
conyosis, numano, ultra microscopic, silico, volcano, conyosis. So I think this has made
up for a quiz or something. I applied the algorithm of turning it into a numeronim, and
it turns up with p43s. So here's my conclusion, then, numeronim's don't appeal to you,
when you're already gathered.
Notwithstanding my little jokes above, I know the proposal is not to replace all longer
words with them. This would cause chaos. However, as a means of denoting long words, this
seems wrong. I assume that their evolution occurs like this. We use a word often in a particular
context. The word is long and not easy to type. For the sake of speed, and to avoid
typographic areas, we make a numeronim. We tell the world that I 18n, as an example means
internationalisation. Those in the know have no problems with it, but many people who are
encountered later and counter it later, puzzle over it, as I'm doing here. It seems fair
to say that this obscure process has fulfilled the need to abbreviate this awkwardly
long word in the limits of the context where it's evolved, and it's not conveyed information
very well. It has mainly benefited those who write or read documentation relating to
the context. It's hard to speed it, especially the thing. Many editor-in-word process
replications have the facility of expanding abbreviations like this in my experience. I use
them all the time, and there's an abbreviation. Commander, you can say, use this sequence
of letters to signify this phrase or word or whatever. And I've got loads of them. This
process is very nice plug-in, which does a really good job, so I can point you to if you're
interested. I'd rather use this than embed the coded abbreviation into the language.
On the other hand, I'm okay with the new Mowr thingy being replaced by P43S. So, I must
just be at a step with a lot of people, but I must confess that I had a similar reaction
to XKCDs exercise in using limited number of words to explain things. He did a thing called
upgoer 5, which I blinked, which explains the Saturn 5, which he says X is explained, using
only the 100 words people use the most often. You might disagree with me about what I'm
saying here if you're free to add a comment to this show or indeed, record a show of your own.
And in my links, I have included all this stuff that I've mentioned, and also one of my favorite
fake words, which is the Welsh village, which I used to be able to pronounce very, very
long, and it's abbreviated to L64H. I'm not going to try and pronounce it. I can do it if I give
myself enough time. I run up to it slowly, but I've been there, and one of the, it's quite a nice
little village in the north of Wales on the island of Anglesey. You go into the station,
you can buy a platform ticket, just a thing that used to happen. You want to get on
a platform to away by to people, and it's extremely long, because it's got the entire name on it.
And this name was created in order to get more tourists visit apparently. So, which, you know,
the problem? It's the second longest place name in Europe, might be the world. I don't
know, check the Wikipedia page I've linked to it. Okay, that's me then. I've finished, and
look, looking forward to any feedback you might have. Okay, bye.
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