Linux file system hierarchy
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@tonyshowoff said:
I'm not the only person that's reporting hearing a brash, 20-something, Ubuntu sportsman saying "etsee" and not knowing what the hell he's talking about at first. I've only heard it in the last 5 years or so from really young people who use things like Ubuntu.
The pronunciation of etc as etsee was actually taught as part of the AIX / UNIX certification track back in 2000. It's certainly not a new thing. If someone called it et cetera I would think that they were young and were not aware of the history of the etc directory in UNIX.
Just like /usr is pronounced "you sir" not "user" because it is the "UNIX System Repository" and not short for "User".
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@tonyshowoff said:
I've only heard, vaguely, of reports of much older school than me people saying "etsee" though I've never once actually heard this. Also a lot of date-based searching, it seems that "etsee" is very rarely mentioned before about 2009, and almost never prior to 2004, though it does come up.
After over 20 years in UNIX administration, I've yet to hear it as anything except etsee or E-T-C. That anyone thought it was et cetera is news to me. And I know UNIX admins in the thousands including from pretty big UNIX shops including IBM itself and CitiGroup (which was the world's largest Solaris shop when I was there.) And a lot of those people had UNIX going back to 1990 or even the 80s.
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@nadnerB said:
@tonyshowoff said:
What about all those damn young people now saying "etsee" for "etc" instead of "et cetera" or the more typical European "e-t-c"?
AAAARRRRRGGGGHHH!!!!!!!!!!! That makes me want to S.o.I.P. (Slap over Internet Protocol)
etsee is the industry standard and, AFAIK, always has been. You could argue for several options, but as it is not et cetera, that is one that you can't say. Etsee, E-T-C, or something close could be argued as there is no central naming authority to define what it must be. But it is not Latin, et cetera is the only option that I know would be wrong as that's something completely different.
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@Dashrender said:
I've heard the use of 'etsee' but never in relation to linux.
I don't say et cetera either, I say e-t-c.
If you are in UNIX, say etsee or e-t-c. If you are using English and it is an abbreviation you should always say et cetera.
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@tonyshowoff said:
I have heard "e-t-c" a lot though, which is one syllable longer than "etsee," but actually I think I've heard more people say "e-t-c" than even "et cetera" and I have noticed it's heavily used among non-UK Europeans, though I've heard a lot of Americans and English say "e-t-c" too.
I don't agree there. If you tell me to put files in or "go to" et cetera I'm going to be pretty confused since there is no filesystem component named or intended to mean et cetera. Just because etc is also short fo et cetera doesn't mean that you can extrapolate that term from the filesystem name.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Doesn't mean standards can't evolve though, so long as everyone is clear. It's the first time I've ever heard of "etsee", but if that becomes the standard I'll just learn to adjust.
In the pure UNIX Admin space, I've never heard or heard rumour of anything but etsee. AFAIK, it is and has always been the industry standard both in official and de facto practice.
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@scottalanmiller Based on what? Even manuals as far back as 1984, which I linked, point out it is short for et cetera. If it wasn't short for et cetera, what would it possibly be short for?
/usr is user, I sort of feel like you're being sarcastic now, because /usr was the original location for home directories, like /usr/dmr for Dennis Ritchie. I don't know of early attestments at all that these are anything except abbreviations, the acronyms come much later, seemingly the late 90s and early 2000s is when they were made popular.
If there are attestments that /usr means anything other than user, and /etc means anything other than et cetera prior to 1984, I'd love to see them, and that isn't sarcasm, but it's as far back as I was able to find, granted I didn't look too hard.
I do know people have been saying etsee for a long time, I even said I've heard of people saying it for years, I've never witnessed this myself though at all.
But you mention AIX, so I'm curious now if that has something to do with it at well. We're all saying Unix and even talking about Linux, but I'm starting to wonder if the overall community also has influence on this as well. I'm surprised you've never heard "et cetera" before, even 20 years ago I remember explicitly hearing that, because early on I said "e-t-c", and this was in the Linux community at the time, later on I got heavily involved in FreeBSD and also Sun, but admittedly I didn't have voice discussions about Sun that much, mostly electronic so I can't say with any confidence how people in that community said much of anything.
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What drives me really crazy is when people are sloppy with SQL. Unlike /etc which has no defining body with authoritative pronunciation decision making power to determine what it must be, SQL, in all cases, does have a current, existing body that determines how it is pronounced in every instance. This is because the pronunciation is determined by the vendors who make the product. There is no ambiguity. Yet, for a series of products where there is no grey area, few things are pronounced more loosely!! In many cases these are commercial product or company names, not subject to personal interpretation.
SQL the language is pronounced "ess cue ell" and is owned and defined by IBM and several standards bodies. The pronunciation guide was built into the spec to make sure no one mistook the intent since SQL replaced the earlier SEQUEL language which, quite obviously, was pronounced "sequel."
MS SQL Server is also pronounced "sequel server" and is owned and defined by Microsoft. This is the only major vendor pronouncing it in this fashion.
MySQL is pronounced "my ess cue ell" and is owned and defined by Oracle.
PostgreSQL is pronounced "Post gress cue ell" and is owned and defined by PostgreSQL itself.
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@scottalanmiller said:
What drives me really crazy is when people are sloppy with SQL. Unlike /etc which has no defining body with authoritative pronunciation decision making power to determine what it must be, SQL, in all cases, does have a current, existing body that determines how it is pronounced in every instance. This is because the pronunciation is determined by the vendors who make the product. There is no ambiguity. Yet, for a series of products where there is no grey area, few things are pronounced more loosely!! In many cases these are commercial product or company names, not subject to personal interpretation.
SQL the language is pronounced "ess cue ell" and is owned and defined by IBM and several standards bodies. The pronunciation guide was built into the spec to make sure no one mistook the intent since SQL replaced the earlier SEQUEL language which, quite obviously, was pronounced "sequel."
MS SQL Server is also pronounced "sequel server" and is owned and defined by Microsoft. This is the only major vendor pronouncing it in this fashion.
MySQL is pronounced "my ess cue ell" and is owned and defined by Oracle.
PostgreSQL is pronounced "Post gress cue ell" and is owned and defined by PostgreSQL itself.
I remember talking to you about this at Spiceworks meeting and I did research (by that I mean looked it up for once) after we spoke and I saw you were right. I try to say "Sequel" for everything except the name "MySQL" but I sometimes fall back into saying "S-Q-L" for the language, but far less often than I used to. I always said "Sequel" for SQL Server and T-SQL, etc. My main confusion was calling SQL used for MySQL "S-Q-L" as well, not just in the name.
Edit: I'm now confused, are you saying the language is or is not "Sequel" since it replaced "SEQUEL"?
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@tonyshowoff said:
My main confusion was calling SQL used for MySQL "S-Q-L" as well, not just in the name.
I'm not sure how that is pronounced in that one case. If MySQL is using stock SQL, then the pronunciation would be as defined by the standard. But if they are using their own modification of it, like MS does with T-SQL, then they would need their own name and could define their own pronunciation of it. But as it is, it appears that they use the SQL name from SQL itself so it is just S-Q-L. Which, since they is how they pronounce the product name, it already matches so I am sure that they would want that anyway.
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@scottalanmiller Well, whatever happens, I'm just glad I'm not one of those gauche people who says "My SEQUEL", curiously I've even heard big-time MySQL people say this, it just sounds weird though.
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@tonyshowoff said:
@scottalanmiller Well, whatever happens, I'm just glad I'm not one of those gauche people who says "My SEQUEL", curiously I've even heard big-time MySQL people say this, it just sounds weird though.
I know, me too. It always makes me question how much experience they really have if they aren't even aware of the product's name! Even casual users would, one would hope, take the time to ask how it is pronounced. That's very basic. It sounds weird and grating to hear it the wrong way too.
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You can tell the pure Microsoft folks because they are often unaware that the relational database world is older and and far, far larger than just MS SQL Server. If you look in SW you often see people abbreviating MS SQL Server down to just "SQL" which isn't even the name of the language it uses let alone the product. This can be very confusing since there are tons of "SQL servers" like Oracle, Sybase, Informix, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, SQLite and on and on. Using "SQL server" as some bizarre term meaning "relational database" is really poor.
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@scottalanmiller said:
You can tell the pure Microsoft folks because they are often unaware that the relational database world is older and and far, far larger than just MS SQL Server.
Our conversation at Spiceworks on this issue actually began because I had mentioned an IT guy had told me that "Anyone who pronounces MySQL as anything other than My Sequel shows they don't really know anything about Sequel." And he tried to be a condescending smart ass, ironically he didn't even know basic SQL syntax, so I'm not sure what he was on about.
I only say "SQL Server" in the context of Microsoft if that's a part of the discussion, otherwise I do clarify MSSQL or Microsoft SQL Server. I do see people say "SQL Server" as if it's a definable product like Windows, when there are many, many servers which allow SQL. And really Sybase also calls theirs that too, IIRC, I may be wrong about that, it's been nearly 15 years.
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I'd also like to add to Post 27 that for the most part almost all of the discussions I've had offline about Unix and Linux have been with Europeans, or Americans at conventions like Defcon, Blackhat, and HOPE, and that could also be a major influence on what I've heard as well, not having heard etsee at all prior to that. Additionally in the corporate world, I always heard "e-t-c". Even at large, nation unnamed ISP I worked there were many Unix machines, later replaced mostly by Linux, and in conversations I had with the various sysadmins, they either said "e-t-c" or one person specifically did say "et cetera."
So, perhaps there's a large gap between the European communities, hacker communities, and other corporate communities like with IBM. I'm still curious about any mention of pronunciation or non-abbreviated meaning any old manuals, especially standard setting/referencing ones may have if you know of any, but they're old manuals, and I haven't met many people aside from me that cares to read obsolete material.
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@tonyshowoff said:
I only say "SQL Server" in the context of Microsoft if that's a part of the discussion, otherwise I do clarify MSSQL or Microsoft SQL Server. I do see people say "SQL Server" as if it's a definable product like Windows, when there are many, many servers which allow SQL. And really Sybase also calls theirs that too, IIRC, I may be wrong about that, it's been nearly 15 years.
In print the capitalization allows you to say simply SQL Server to mean the Microsoft product of that name rather than a generic server that uses SQL which would be a SQL server. Capitalized it is always Microsoft, not capitalized it is always generic. Just like the space does with XenServer. XenServer is a full packaged product based on Xen and CentOS. A Xen server (with a space) is any server built on Xen technology including ones from Ubuntu, Oracle and Suse. XenServer is a Xen server, but so are many other things. MS SQL Server, MySQL, SQLite are all SQL servers.
I normally say "M-S SQL Server" in speech to be clear.
Once upon a time (pre 1997, I think) MS SQL Server and Sybase were the same product. They split at some point. For a long time, MS SQL Server was just Sybase repackaged. To the best of my knowledge, Sybase has not had a product called "SQL Server" for decades. They make things like ASE now.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Once upon a time (pre 1997, I think) MS SQL Server and Sybase were the same product. They split at some point. For a long time, MS SQL Server was just Sybase repackaged. To the best of my knowledge, Sybase has not had a product called "SQL Server" for decades. They make things like ASE now.
Shows you when the last time I messed around with that
Same company I worked for switched from Sybase, flat files, and some other weird stuff inherited from some acquisitions to Oracle, I guess for a desire to spend even more money on licenses 
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@tonyshowoff said:
So, perhaps there's a large gap between the European communities, hacker communities, and other corporate communities like with IBM. I'm still curious about any mention of pronunciation or non-abbreviated meaning any old manuals, especially standard setting/referencing ones may have if you know of any, but they're old manuals, and I haven't met many people aside from me that cares to read obsolete material.
IBM had it in the material for the AIX certs circa 2000. So that material almost had to be from 1999 or before, it would have been hard to have produced it more recently than that. Pronunciations for "etc" and "usr" were drilled into us. But it was less corporate and more "UNIX", AIX back then was very, very mainstream and one of the dominant players (this was before the explosion in Linux adoption) and vendors like IBM and Sun calling it "etsee" made for the majority of the industry then.
Since Sun's team and AT&T's Bell Labs team sat together and worked together, I'd be surprised if "etsee" wasn't a direct trickle down from AT&T themselves.
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@scottalanmiller said:
SQL the language is pronounced "ess cue ell" and is owned and defined by IBM and several standards bodies.
A quick googling says the ISO standard pronounces it "es queue el", although I can't find any original sources. I've always pronounced it (the language) like that, and the products according to how the vendor pronounces them (ie MS sequal server, MyS-Q-L). There seems to be enough ambiguity on the official pronunciation to mean that both are valid.
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@tonyshowoff said:
@scottalanmiller Well, whatever happens, I'm just glad I'm not one of those gauche people who says "My SEQUEL", curiously I've even heard big-time MySQL people say this, it just sounds weird though.
@scottalanmiller said:
I know, me too. It always makes me question how much experience they really have if they aren't even aware of the product's name! Even casual users would, one would hope, take the time to ask how it is pronounced. That's very basic. It sounds weird and grating to hear it the wrong way too.
I completely disagree with this.
I know exactly how it is pronounced, yet I never say it that way because it is clunky. Very rarely does anyone pronounce the individual letters of ANY acronym when they can be spoken in a more fluid method.
In this case the hard Q is the killer sound that makes it not flow right.
I cannot stand anal people that go off on "correct" when the smoothed pronunciation is a completely accepted standard.
