Re: Flamewars & Why pedantic spelling is good.
On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 03:37:15PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:
>
> > btw, as someone has mentioned privately, 'howto' is no more a word than
> > 'zonefile' is. perhaps there should be auto spelling-flame bug reports
> > on every package that uses 'howto' rather than 'how to' in the
> > description.
>
> Except that "howto" has become a noun rather like "manpage". This is not
> true in the case of "zonefile".
Besides being in common usage, 'howto' is present in several package names,
which caused it to be automatically excluded from my check. Even if this
weren't the case, 'howto' is used in the title of a large number of
documents, packaged and unpackaged, which means that it is correct in a
majority of instances (since it is used in that context). I may disagree
with the coinage of a new word for this purpose, but I don't think that I
can rightly disagree with all of the authors who have borrowed it and used
it to title their own documents, and even if I did, I couldn't win that
battle.
The Linux Documentation Project alone has over 200 documents named this way.
--
- mdz
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