Monday, 12 June 2006
Miscellany
You know, I find it quite amusing, given Al Gore’s connection to Steve Jobs (Gore serves on Apple’s board of directors, in case you didn’t know), that at the same time An Inconvenient Truth is released, so is Cars.
Since Textpander has become TextExpander, and now comes with a thirty-dollar price tag, all of its little quirks may send me back to TypeIt4Me, of which I am a registered user already.
The biggest quirk? If I misstype an abbreviation with Textpander, but backspace and fix the abbreviation’s spelling, it won’t trigger the full text. TypeIt4Me does. With Textpander, I have to delete whatever part of the abbreviation I’ve typed, and start over.
I really like the FIFA World Cup smiley-faced logo. It’s just so cheery.
When you see “Fédération Internationale de Football Association”, does Monty Python and the “Department of Redundancy Department” come to mind, or is it just me?
posted on June 12, 2006 4:08 PMI'm not sure, but my inclination is to say that the reason FIFA stands for "Fédération Internationale de Football Association" is not redundancy, but the etymology of the term "football" itself.
When a non-native speaker reads something like this, we automatically group "[a]ssociation" with "[f]édération." But FIFA presumably is referring to the origins of the game, which was known as association football in England, due to the fact that it was played by "association" rules, versus rugby rules. (That's where we get "soccer" from.)
In French, that's "football association," since it has the Latin noun-adjective construction instead of our Germanic adjective-noun. In other words, it's all 100 pour cent français correct, rather than a redundancy -- translated as "International Federation of Association Football."
Posted by: Wes Meltzer at June 12, 2006 6:11 PM
We did fix the backspace issue when we first released TextExpander 1.3. - Jean/SmileOnMyMac
Posted by: Jean MacDonald at June 12, 2006 8:31 PM
Wes:
Thanks for the etymological lesson; very interesting. I did not know about the origins of the game's rules. Still, for ignorant folks, which I would have been among earlier today, the look of redundancy in the title stands.
Jean:
Good to hear the backspace issue is solved in the SmileOnMyMac version. I still don't think I'm shelling out the thirty bucks for the upgrade when I'm already a registered TypeIt4Me user.
Posted by: retrophisch 
at June 13, 2006 1:08 AM