Re: Not snazzy (was: New Unicode Savvy Logo)

Marco Cimarosti scripsit:

> My English-Italian dictionary has two "savvy" entries: an adjective (labeled
> "fam. amer." = "US English, informal") and a noun (labeled "antiq. / fam." =
> "archaic or informal"). However, all the translations have to do with
> "common sense", and none of them seems to explain the intuitive meaning of
> "Unicode savvy", which I guess is supposed to be: "Unicode enabled",
> "Unicode supported", "encoded in Unicode", etc.

In case your dictionary does not explain this, its etymology is the
Portuguese verb "saber" < Lat. SAPERE, which was used in the original
Lingua Franca and from there spread into almost all the pidgins and
creoles of the Earth.  As you can well imagine, a pidgin needs a verb
for "understand/comprehend" as one of its very basic words!  So it
can be verb ("understand"), adjective ("being able to understand"),
or noun ("comprehension").  The last is the least informal, at least in
English; the adjective is evidently meant here, and in more normative
orthography "Unicode-savvy" would be used.

But I agree that it's bad wording and a bad design.  Please try again,
O Unicode Consortium!

                Wan pisi ting dat mi av got,
                Maski dat ting mi no can du,
                Yu taki yu no savi wat?
                Bambu.
                        --Lewis Carroll (modern orthography)

(Note the third line, meaning "You say you don't understand what [I mean]?")

-- 
The man that wanders far                        jcowan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
from the walking tree                           http://www.reutershealth.com
        --first line of a non-existent poem by:         John Cowan


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