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CertainlyWorse  No one is coming. It's just you.  3d ago (text post)   878 thread views

Speechcraft and Pithiness: Give your tips here

This isn't a large question. Because of the users we have here, I think we could all benefit from short sharp tips to edit our own words.

In this topic, can you provide advice on how to curate yourself when you throw words in speech and on 'paper'.

Links to 'speechcraft' sources are appreciated.

I'll start:

  • Take a second to think about how someone else would hear your words if they were you. (rule 0)
  • Curate and cut your words before you throw them.
  • "Brevity is the soul of wit" - Hamlet - Shakespeare.
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I maintain a git repo about the "programmer dialect of English" that I use to teach my computer science/data science students how to not sound like a n00b/PHB. It's niche, but many people here are likely to fit into the niche.

The document goes over phonology / lexicon / grammar / discourse differences in programmer English vs American standard English, but to give you all a taste, here's the top of the phonology section:

  1. RAG (as in retrieval augmented generation with LLMs) is pronounced "rag" not "R-A-G".

    NOTE: The word "rag" has only one sylable and is faster/easier to pronounce than the 3-sylable "R-A-G". The practice of pronouncing abbreviations as acronyms stems from the programmer's desire for efficiency in all things.

  2. ICLR (a famous machine learning conference) is pronounced "I clear".

  3. PNG is pronounced "ping" and not "pee-en-gee". This pronunciation is specified in the standard.

    The G in GIF is pronounced like the G in GIGANTIC.

The word "random" should not be used as a synonym for "arbitrary." In particular, it should only be used when there is a corresponding distribution that is being sampled from.

But then RAM would be harder to say: AAM.

There is no good reason for [pronouncing GNU with a hard g] other than to make identifying outsiders easy

It's from a song.

The song came first, but I doubt Stallman or any of the fellow GNU folk had that song as an explicit motivation.

I gknew I was right!

It's also the pronounciation we use in the one true language, German.

Coincidentially, we'd appreciate if you anglo louts would also pronounce the word German itself correctly - with the hard G. And the a is an a, not an ä, so get your pronounciation of that in order as well.

It's definitely P-N-G and not "ping", imo.

The G in GIF is pronounced like

I tend to pronounce it with a 'y' sound. This can create problems with programmers since they tend to prefer yiff GIFs.

I’ve started using the buzzing G sound from “menagerie”.

Wait, you say "I-S-O", not "iso"? How can you not pronounce the international standards ("ways we should all be the same") organization acronym like the Greek prefix meaning "the same"?

Whoa... you're blowing my mind...

But do you really pronounce something like ISO/IEC 27000:2018 as "ey-so slash eye ee cee ..."? I guess I never refer to the name of the org without a bunch of other numbers after it.

The programmers I know usually say it as a single word - which mostly occurs when pronouncing ISO 8601 (which I would say as "eyeso eight six oh one").

I don't pronounce the slash, but yeah.

I also don't refer to IEC standards that often, but that reminds me that IEEE is another odd one: I've never heard it pronounced "I-E-E-E", or in fact any way but "eye triple e".

The G in GIF is pronounced like the G in GIGANTIC.

GIGANTIC.

You bastard.

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