electronic communications, cont. (70)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@VM.EPAS.UTORONTO.CA)
Sat, 22 Apr 89 22:28:41 EDT
Humanist Mailing List, Vol. 2, No. 874. Saturday, 22 Apr 1989.
(1) Date: Sat, 22 Apr 89 12:51:15 CDT (29 lines)
From: Natalie Maynor <MAYNOR@MSSTATE>
Subject: Coinages and E-Style
(2) Date: 22 April 1989 (21 lines)
From: Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: electronic communications and scientific research
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 89 12:51:15 CDT
From: Natalie Maynor <MAYNOR@MSSTATE>
Subject: Coinages and E-Style
I hope you are not getting tired of my frequent postings, but I just
got a note from a fellow HUMANIST that made me interested in finding
out what some of the others of you think about the use of the word
(or non-word) "resend" in my previous posting. She said that she
thought that there was no such verb as "resend" and that the correct
usage would be "send again." (The context here is resending -- or
sending again -- bitnet mail that might have gotten lost.) Did
anybody else find "resend" a strange word? I agree that it probably
doesn't exist as an English verb, and I can see that it might cause
confusion in spoken English because of the existence of the word
"rescind." I'm asking your opinions out of curiosity about
reactions to coinages, what kinds of coinages seem acceptable and
what kinds offensive, etc. Could my use of "resend" be an example
of e-style? I disagree, by the way, with the recent HUMANIST
comment that there is no such thing as electronic style. I'm not
saying that everybody who uses electronic mail changes writing
style, and I do not think that there is much evidence of an
electronic style on HUMANIST. But try looking at the language on
some other lists, not to mention the language in interactive
situations like Relay (if you can stand the e-screaming on Relay very
long). Forgive me for turning HUMANIST into a forum on linguistics.
Then again, the versatility of this list is one of its virtues in my
opinion. Natalie Maynor (maynor@msstate.bitnet)
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 22 April 1989
From: Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: electronic communications and scientific research
Page A10 of my local paper, The Globe and Mail, for Saturday 22 April,
is almost completely dominated by articles about the so-called "cold
nuclear fusion experiment." Many of you will know that some scientists
at the University of Utah, in the western U.S., have reported a
successful attempt to produce nuclear fusion under controlled conditions
in the laboratory -- and at low temperatures. For obvious reasons their
claim has generated a storm of interest. Nobel laureate John Polanyi has
expressed considerable distress that the "due process" of science was
circumvented when the Utah scientists took their findings to the press
before they had been verified. In one article, republished from the San
Francisco Chronicle, the author comments that "The episode has turned
the usually well-controlled, measured pace of academic science into a
stew of claim, counterclaim, and rumor. Results have been distributed
worldwide on fax machines rather than in carefully edited journals."
Willard McCarty