[kde-doc-english]Re: Fwd: "filename" or "file name"

[Daniel Stone]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 03:53:34PM +0200, Stephan Kulow wrote:
> OK, then why is it keyboard, notebook, football? I can't see a confusion.

Words are also often compounded when they fall into extremely common use (e.g,
notebook, laptop, filename), because people are lazy. And, let's face it, if we
were all so obsessive over correct English, we wouldn't have this "color" blight
all through KDE. :)

> I can only refer to 
> http://www.learnenglish.org.uk/grammar/archive/compoundnouns01.html
> (not having such a big background in linguistic as you have):
>   "Just exactly how and why these three forms exist is not exactly clear, 
>   but it seems likely that the process will begin with two words, become 
>   hyphenated after a time, and then eventually end up as just one word. 
>   It is curious that even good dictionaries sometimes disagree with how 
>   compound nouns should be spelt!"
> 
> So instead of trying to comply to non existant standards, we should go
> for the more common spelling - and as such google results are a _perfect_
> measurement: ergo use filename.

Often Google results can turn up absolute rubbish[0], but in this case, 5-to-1
is hard to beat. Then again, Google will tell you "color" instead of "colour"
...

I say go with filename, because that's what's in common use.

-- 
Daniel Stone                                              <daniel at fooishbar.org>
http://www.debian.org - http://www.kde.org - http://www.freedesktop.org
"Configurability is always the best choice when it's pretty simple to implement"
  -- Havoc Pennington, gnome-list
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