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Off-topic but honest question: Why does everyone say "maths" instead of "math" these days? Is it a European thing, an academic thing, or just a meme among hac
by jraines 18y ago
Off-topic but honest question: Why does everyone say "maths" instead of "math" these days? Is it a European thing, an academic thing, or just a meme among hackers?
I never once heard it or saw it written like that before Hacker News / proggit.
I cringed when someone on proggit recently said "Do the maths!" I don't think that's a saying anywhere.
- sethg 18y agoUK "maths" = USA "math"
- pc 18y ago"Maths" is the standard term outside of North America, as far as I know. I'm Irish, and "math" has always sounded odd. It seems that "maths" is the semantically correct option. To take your quote, "do the math" expands to "do the mathematic" - which is surely wrong.
- tlrobinson 18y agoI also cringe when people use the term "codes" instead of "code". I don't think of code as being divisible into discrete units, it's like a fluid. Like "water", you rarely say "waters". There are "programs" and "libraries" and "frameworks" that are made up of "code" or multiple "files containing code"... but they are not "codes"! If you want to use the word "codes", you'll need to give me an adequate definition of the word "code" as a singular noun (which I will most likely disagree with). In my mind "code" means programming language code, and "codes" means cryptography related codes. </rant>
- gaius 18y ago"Codes" is the common usage in the engineering sector, probably because "code" was already in-use to identify component items.
- davidw 18y agoI agree with you, and the name of the concept is "uncountable noun": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncountable_noun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncountable_noun One of the funnier differences between Italian and English is that in the former, you say "hairs" - it's not uncountable, which to us sounds pretty funny, as I'm sure we do when talking about our "one hair". "My hairs are all messed up!"
- mst 18y agoI despise it. It's an effective way to eliminate idiots though, "plz send teh codes" being the canonical example. I find 'plz' and 'thx' and 'tks' and '10x' and so on the most annoying though; how the fuck is it polite if you can't even be bothered to spell the complete word? If you want to show gratitude, 'thanks' or 'thank you' are much better, and english already provides 'ta' as a short form. Sigh. People treating IRC like AOL make my sad.
- tlrobinson 18y agoUnfortunately it's actually not a very good idiot filter because a lot of non-native English speakers seem to use "codes" instead of "code".