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Path: utzoo!linus!gatech!ut-sally!bulko
From: bulko@ut-sally.UUCP (William C. Bulko)
Newsgroups: net.startrek
Subject: Re: ENOUGH!
Message-ID: <3593@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 20-Nov-85 17:37:22 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.3593
Posted: Wed Nov 20 17:37:22 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Nov-85 22:03:39 EST
References: <526@unmc.UUCP>
Reply-To: bulko@sally.UUCP (William C. Bulko)
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 38

In article <526@unmc.UUCP> cwayne@unmc.UUCP (Chris Wayne) writes:
>
>     I have had enough of this!!  Hey Guys, what's going on here anyway?
>Almost everytime someone here on the net refers to an episode it's always
>the title spelled all the way out (which is fine) or some mutilated string
>of garbled gibberish like FTWIHAIHTTS, COTEOF, or WNMHGB.  I'm sure that Bjo 
>Trimble wanted to beat her head on a wall just so that ignerents could just
>go ahead and ignor the fact that she came up with an 'official' (had to
>throw that in so I don't get flamed at as much) handy-dandy reference 
>episode call letters so that each episode could be referenced by an
>easy-to-learn code and have it mean something instead of all this yibberish.
>     If you don't have the concordance, here is the list.  Do yourself a
>favor - learn and use them properly.

Oh, so the rest of the world is supposed to memorize and follow the
convention YOU find preferable?  I'm sure.  Wouldn't it be easier if the
author of an article simply arranged it so that whatever abbreviations he/she
used could easily be understood?  Newspapers and magazines do it all the
time:  there's an unwritten rule of style that recommends the unabbreviated
form of a phrase should appear somewhere in the article before the
abbreviated form is used.  Thus, before the abbreviation became common
knowledge, any article containing the acronym "AIDS" always used the full
phrase "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" SOMEWHERE.  Rather than having
every reader of net.startrek memorize Trimble's system (or, Heaven forbid,
your *expanded* version!) why not just type out the full title (or a
REASONABLE subset thereof) somewhere in the article?  Once I mention "For the
World is Hollow. . .", I'm sure later references to FTWIHAIHTTS would make
sense.
    I have the Concordance, and I can see that Trimble's system is good and
very useful AT TIMES, but I don't think it's necessary for everyone to go out
and learn it.  For the most part, this newsgroup consists of people who just
*like the show* -- not people who buy every single article on the market that
says "Star Trek" on the box/cover.  (And make up call letters for them.)
     By the way, "ignerents", "ignor", and "yibberish" do not follow the
"official" standards for English.  Why don't you go off and memorize the
dictionary?  :-)

					Bill