Re: Pound and Lira (was: Re: The Currency Symbol of China)

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Mon Sep 30 2002 - 18:58:14 EDT

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    Kenneth Whistler scripsit:

    > "The High Ogonek is symptomatic of one of the things
    > wrong about the character standardization business,
    > which encourages the blithe perpetuation of mistaken
    > 'characters' from standard to standard,

    "Charadords", one might call them. See
    http://www.snopes.com/language/mistakes/dord.htm , the best account of
    "dord" I can find quickly, but with two significant omissions (read it
    first, then come back here):

    1) The entry for "dord" was not mis-sorted; rather, abbreviations were
    originally to be listed separately, but late in development the decision
    was taken to merge words and abbrevs into one list.

    2) M-W's convention for typing headwords on index cards was to Germanspace
    them, thus: "D o r d", making the confusion with "D or d" highly
    plausible, given the erratic spacing behavior of manual typewriters. 

    -- 
Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,  || http://www.reutershealth.com
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau,           || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.            -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)

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