No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
All in all, the / is just one style of abbreviation used in English. It's not only used for "with", but also a few other words (w/o = without, N/A = not applicable).
In German we abbreviate using a dot (e.g. "m." = "mit" = "with). That's not more or less intuitive, it's just what you are used to.
What's kinda special with English is that there are multiple abbreviation styles. Off the top of my head I can think of six styles:
I'm used to Dr., Mr., Mrs. all needing the dot.
I'd also add the medical ones which all use x, and most use the first letter of the word, but not all, so it's kinda point 3, kinda not:
Both are possible: Dr and Dr.
Never heard of the x version. Very interresting.
I work in radio electronics and RX is receive. TX is transmit.
In programmer lingo we'll sometimes shorten words with the number of letters in between:
i18n (internationalization) and L10n (localization). I just learned of g11n (globalization), too.
Wait until you learn about k8s
Just start using it for everything and confuse everyone.. I mean E6E
This one is terrible IMO. A11y is ironically very inaccessible unless you’re aware of this unintuitive system.
Now that I know it though, it's a good way to distinguish between similar common abbreviations. For instance I know you don't mean "Actually" even though I'm not sure what you do mean by A11y.
Also k8s for Kubernetes.
Wait. That is why it's called i18n!? Never knew that.
True, forgot about that one. I really hat this style of abbreviation^^
F3d i0t f1r y1u.
Aaarg!!
you h2e it?
d4s (dingus)
r13y (reproducibility)
Dr., Mrs., Ms. etc. are traditionally abbreviated with periods/dots but it does raise issues typing on one's phone because autocorrect thinks it's the end of a sentence, so sans dots is becoming more common. And there's other examples which have never had dots, like nvm and af
X is a little special, it stands for Cross and therefore also for Christ. When illiterate medieval people had to sign documents they were told to make the sign of the Cross, since they were usually swearing
Edit: anyone else always pronounce PED XING as pedexing instead of pedestrian crossing?
Using the period with titles is standard in the US and leaving out the period is standard in the UK.
As a non-Christian, I never made that Xmas connection. It sounds cool, but I was never sure why anyone started calling that (and evidently never curious enough to go looking for an answer or even really ask, I just kinda took it as one of those things that is how it is because people are going to people).
Oddly enough, people who didn't know that part of the history got angry "they took Christ out of Christmas!" So then people who liked the holiday but not the religion used it to do exactly that. As you say, people people.
Well, as a Christian, I wouldn't feel bad about it because the poster is not correct. The X in Xmas does not stand for a cross, it comes from the Greek spelling of Christ which is Χριστός. The chi-rho symbol (☧) is an imposition of the first two letters (Χ and ρ) and is still commonly used to refer to Christ in some denominations.
As a bonus: if you've ever wondered (or not wondered) why some Christian symbolism uses a fish, ἸΧΘΥΣ (or ICTHYS) is an acronym for Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ, "which translates into English as 'Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior'." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys) This has been used since the first century.
And that presumably is drawn as a fish in some language?
"ἰχθύς" is the ancient greek word for "fish" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%99%CE%A7%CE%98%CE%A5%CE%A3
When you type Dr., et al., you normally follow it with a proper noun. Why is the auto caps an issue?
Both Dr and Dr. are possible.
Yes, that's how I pronounce it.
Don’t forget re: which means regarding or in reference to, not reply.
... I think it's actually a Latin word, "re,", meaning, "the matter (subject)" not an abbreviation at all.
yeah this is a real pet peeve of mine.
In German many people, web mailers and also sometimes even email software use "AW:" (short for AntWort) instead of "Re:" and then some of them don't even recognize the existence of a previous "AW:" or "Re:" giving you such wondrous email subjects as: "AW: Re: AW: Re: AW: AW: Re: AW: Re: really important subject" 🤦
Oh, that totally works with a single language too: "Re: Re: Re:..." or "AW: AW: AW:..." seen both of that often enough.
yes indeed. i keep being confused how email can still suck so much sometimes when it had decades to mature.
Massive amounts of federation ;)
It's really hard to get thousands of software development companies, hundreds of thousands of hosters and billions of users to unitedly go for a new thing.
don't forget using contractions on single words, like cont'd, pop'n (sometimes written pop^n^)
don't forget x in medical settings. eg, dx is diagnose, tx is treatment, etc
Bonus points for one of your examples being e.g. which stands for exempli gratia, translating to "for example"
I think it's usually the first letter(s) and the last letter(s). In older English handwritings I've come across M.ʳ etc. So I think that's were those came from.
In the Speedwriting shorthand system, developed in 1924 for use with typewriter, / Is used to denote omitted sylables, so 'with' becomes w/ and 'without' becomes w/o. Here is a pretty deep guide on the precepts of Speedwriting:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Classic_Speedwriting/wiki/list108/
But shouldn't "w/o" then be written as "w/o/"?
And "N/A" omits more than one sylable in "applicable".
I guess it's a grown system.
Abbreviate using the first and then any choice of following letter that differentiates it from the other possibilities in a specific group: AL, AR, AK, AZ... MA, ME, MD, MI, MN, MS, MO, MT.... WA, WI, WV, WY!
Well tbf those are post codes designed by the postal service to represent states. I wouldn't really count it as a naturally developed abbreviation like the ones above, it's no different from .fr, .es, .co.uk, etc.
The abbreviations for states used before the two-letter ones, however, are much weirder! E.g. Penna. for Pennsylvania
Except Dr., Mr., ie., etc. use a period.