The most irritating way in which W is odd is that it requires three syllables to name, while all the other English letters are monosyllabic. This leads to many unfortunate situations where it takes substantially longer to say the acronym of a title than to say the title itself. Take for example, the World Wildlife Fund, which contains four syllables (or maybe five, depending how you pronounce "wild") and whose acronym contains seven. Given how many acronyms contain the word "World" in particular, this is clearly a massive inefficiency in the way we go about our lives. I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.
Or, of course, WWW (world-wide web) where each word of the acronym is itself a single syllable. This means the acronym is 6 syllables longer if you were speaking it.
Indeed. This has to rank as one of the worst branding mistakes in history. All TBL had to do was call the subdomain "web" but instead he went for the infuriatingly fussy and tongue-tying "www".
It was a different time. Everything from movies to stories at the bus stop were longer, more relaxed, less rushed. www probably didn't seem like a big deal at the time.
Alternates seem... bad. Instead of 'double u', you could say 'sexta-u', but that could lead to a slap in the face. Possibly the same for sextuple-u, which sounds like someone's going to tackle you then do some strange all over you.
If it wasn't for U and V switching in the middle ages, it'd be like the french language which says 'double v', and then 'sexta-v' could be OK.
> It was a different time. Everything from movies to stories at the bus stop were longer, more relaxed, less rushed. www probably didn't seem like a big deal at the time.
Hmm, and yet, though of a different era, we got `cp`, `ls, `mv`, `rm` ....
AnodicElegy · · focus · HN ↗
nkrisc · · focus · HN ↗
bluebarbet · · focus · HN ↗
b112 · · focus · HN ↗
Alternates seem... bad. Instead of 'double u', you could say 'sexta-u', but that could lead to a slap in the face. Possibly the same for sextuple-u, which sounds like someone's going to tackle you then do some strange all over you.
If it wasn't for U and V switching in the middle ages, it'd be like the french language which says 'double v', and then 'sexta-v' could be OK.
JadeNB · · focus · HN ↗
Hmm, and yet, though of a different era, we got `cp`, `ls, `mv`, `rm` ....