Re: what is it?

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001 03:02:42 GMT, Peter Henderson <pet...@usa.net>
provoked the following text:

>Peter Punk wrote:
>> It is an acronym, and if an acronym is pronouncable as a regular word, people
>> usually will pronounce it as a word. 
>> Some examples are NATO, NAFTA, UNESCO, ASCII, etcetera.
>
>Actually, et cetera is two words. It comes from Latin, literally, "and 
>(the) rest." (The is in () because Latin doesn't have articles. Articles 
>are "the" "a" and "an.") So et cetera is not an acronym. Technically it 
>can be one word, but not how it's usually used. Usually it means, "and 
>so forth." As one word it means "odds and ends." Then it's a noun. 
><http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?etcetera> Compare: 
><http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?et%20cetera>. And finally an 
>acronym is a word made from the first letters of other words, according 
>to the dictionary. I think it's also sometimes the first _few_ letters 
>(not only the first _one_).

Gee, had i known that you'd think that i think that etcetera is an acronym (it
is not, it is a contraction as you demonstrated), i would have used "and so
forth" instead.

But you could have known that that's not why "etcetera" was in the list, because
aconyms, contrary to abbreviations, are usually written in all caps. "Etcetera"
wasn't.

>Hope that helps your English to be more perfect. Maybe you can do that 
>with my Danish? (or whatever language(s) you speak, if I remember 
>incorrectly) :o)

Pardon my French, I'm Dutch :-))

So you have taken an interest in the boring and hard-to-pronounce language
called Dutch have you? :-)

>BTW what does "1800wu/2.563yrs" and similar mean in your sig?

I take part in the Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) at home
through the SETI@Home project.
I have installed a program (as have over 3 million others all over the world)
that downloads a piece of data, collected by the Arecibo radio telescope in
Puerto Rico, filters it and when the program is finished filtering the data
package (or work unit as it's called) it sends back the result and downloads
another work unit.

Through the years (2 of them) that this distributed computing project has been
running, a lot of add-ons were build for SETI@Home clients (a client is the
program that does the numbercrunching). Most keep track of your statistics, some
cache a number of workunits in case the server to which to return the results
becomes unreachable, and i have found one that puts some of my current
statistics in a sigfile.

Anyway, the text "1822wu/2.588yrs" means that i have sent back 1822 results and
that it has taken me 2.288 years in computer time to get that far.
That does not mean that i have been participating for 2.588 years, it just means
that the 3 computers i have to my disposal have been running for a comined total
of 2.588 years now.

>BTW again, nice name *wink*

Thanks, but i am thinking about changing that name soon. It doesn't fit me
anymore (i have never thought i'd say that after proting a mohawk for over 13
years...)

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