venta

Yesterday, I got an email from my mother with the subject line "language". This was not, in fact, a rebuke for having used a rude word in my LJ last week, but a message of bogglement at a phrase she'd read.

The email says:
---
There are plans afoot to make a unified something or other of Stockton and
Middlesbrough. The glossy brochure speaks of "the vision of the spectrum of
cityness".
---

Now, besides noting that she thinks it really ought to be "citiness" she is requesting any form of translation or, indeed, indication of what on earth it means.

Anyone interested in further linguo-nonsense should read on.

There is, or at least I thought there was, a well-known phrase or saying "to do something off your own bat", meaning, approximately, to get on and do it yourself, acting on your own initiative. Years back, I was faintly confused by my first boyfriend, who habitually talked about doing things "off your own back". Back ? Bat, surely. Though, on reflection, back might have made more sense. Unless it was a cricketing term.

Yesterday,

secutatrix claimed to have done something on her own back.

So, I want to know which, if any, you'd use. Or any thoughts thereon.
[Poll #426565]

On the way home from work,

onebyone and I were grumbling that Firefox doesn't do the Right and Proper Thing of displaying the alt text for a picture when you hover your mouse over the image. Further grumbling to

wimble revealed why - there is now a title attribute which can be applied to images which should be displayed on hover-over, which Firefox correctly does (I just checked).

Wimble elaborated further that the title can be applied to all kinds of other elements, too - and mentioned one which I'd been very impressed to notice getting used over on

huskyteer's journal the other day.

Now, watch carefully.

Here is a sample sentence from my journal: "DERT will be held in Preston this year."

Do you know what DERT is ? Probably not. So, try this sentence instead:

"DERT will be held in Preston this year."

Hover your mouse over DERT in the second example sentence - and all is revealed. Isn't that clever ?

Bear with me, this is all building up to a further linguo-query. Being thorough-minded types, Wimble and I went looking in the HTML spec. The acronym element, which I used up there, comes under Phrase Elements. As does the abbr element:

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ABBR:
Indicates an abbreviated form (e.g., WWW, HTTP, URI, Mass., etc.).
ACRONYM:
Indicates an acronym (e.g., WAC, radar, etc.).
---

So, I wondered, what's the difference between an abbreviation and an acronym ? I'd have thought that WWW, HTTP etc were acronyms, not abbreviations. The only difference we could think of was that an acronym is required to be pronouncable (or at least pronounced).

Further on in the spec, however, it says:

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The ABBR and ACRONYM elements allow authors to clearly indicate occurrences of abbreviations and acronyms. Western languages make extensive use of acronyms such as "GmbH", "NATO", and "F.B.I.", as well as abbreviations like "M.", "Inc.", "et al.", "etc.".
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Er. Er. Does anyone pronounce FBI ? Fooby ? Even the Germans couldn't pronounce GmbH, surely ? (GmbH is an abbreviation of Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, and is an approximate equivalent of "ltd." after a company name, I think.) That looks far more to me like the split I expected, but it doesn't fit with the previous examples.

Later in the spec it says:

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Note that abbreviations and acronyms often have idiosyncratic pronunciations. For example, while "IRS" and "BBC" are typically pronounced letter by letter, "NATO" and "UNESCO" are pronounced phonetically. Still other abbreviated forms (e.g., "URI" and "SQL") are spelled out by some people and pronounced as words by other people.
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... so both abbreviations and acronyms can be pronounced. Which leaves me with the question not "what is the difference?" but "what on earth do W3C (the writers of the spec) think the difference is?"

And does anyone seriously pronounce URI ? Oori ? Yuri ?