4 ms·

Do you pronounce it as demon or like Matt Damon?

dcow 2y ago
I believe it officially is pronounced the same as demon. But colloquially I hear a lot of (and sometimes find myself using) “damon”.
- whartung 2y ago
  I’m in the Matt Damon camp. Always pronounced it that way, never really gave it much thought. Just seems “right” to me.
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    And now we can perhaps hash out whether the `lib` in `/usr/lib` is pronounced with a long or short 'i'. I hope I'm not the only one who pronounced it the first way with no real thought, and never noticed until I heard someone else say it with a long 'i' that that was obviously the logical pronunciation.
    - dpassens 2y ago
      Surely the logical pronunciation is the way you'd pronounce it in library, so a long 'ai' rather than any kind of 'i'? Though I personally always use the short 'i'. I was going to justify that by saying it's the same as /usr/bin, but that's also short for binaries, so should also be an 'ai'.
      - macintux 2y ago
        I've been pronouncing it with the short 'i' for 30 years, but mainly, possibly only, in my head. In 1998 I started a new job, and my boss pronounced "URL" as "earl". That threw me for a loop, had to fight my way through our first conversation before I figured out what he was saying.
        bitwize 2y ago
        I pronounce API as "appy", which sometimes draws quizzical looks (people think I'm using next-level cutesy slang for "application"). But I never could do the "earl" thing. Or "sequel".
      - JadeNB 2y ago
        > Surely the logical pronunciation is the way you'd pronounce it in library, so a long 'ai' rather than any kind of 'i'? Yep, that's what I meant to say with: > … never noticed until I heard someone else say it with a long 'i' that that was obviously the logical pronunciation. But maybe the sentence structure was too tortured for it to be clear what I was saying. > Though I personally always use the short 'i'. I was going to justify that by saying it's the same as /usr/bin, but that's also short for binaries, so should also be an 'ai'. Oh, shoot, even after I noticed the logical pronunciation of "lib" (long 'i') it never occurred to me that the same applied to "bin". I guess I just can't say any paths out loud any more.
        fwip 2y ago
        Perhaps the difference for you is that "bin" is already an English word with an official pronunciation. Personally, I also use short-i for "lib," because I tend to pronounce shortenings of text as if they were words themselves.
        saltcured 2y ago
        Do you pronounce the vowel in /var as in "bar" or as in "bare"? Also, for those who try to pronounce everything rather than spell them out, where does it end? I now have a newly discovered, morbid interest in how such folks say path elements like "selinux", "httpd", and "pgsql"...
        JadeNB 2y ago
        > Do you pronounce the vowel in /var as in "bar" or as in "bare"? Ha, they're everywhere!
        dpassens 2y ago
        > that's what I meant to say Ah, that makes sense. I thought you meant long 'i' as in extending the duration of the 'i' sound, like in 'beep' vs 'bip'.
    - brianmurphy 2y ago
      I have always pronounced lib like the word liberal. I was mind-blown the first time I heard someone pronounce etc as "et-see". et-see rolls off the tongue so much better than ee-tee-see that it makes perfect sense now.
      - emmelaich 2y ago
        I've pronounced it as `etcet` as short for `et cetera`. But that's probably my Australian habit of shortening everything.
  - bbor 2y ago
    Hard agree. It's an archaic word, it seems a shame not to revel in that fact whenever you use it! I've been using "automata" a lot recently, and that's another one that is just more fun the unusual way. Also it helps that it's clear either way -- no one will be confused upon hearing "daymon" even if they're not used to it, unlike "etsee", "user-slash-libe", "user-slash-bine". Or, god forbid, "oo-zir slash"...
jamesog 2y ago
It should more properly be written as dæmon. The æ ("ash") character is usually pronounced more like "ee", as in encyclopædia. I've never heard anyone say "encycloPAYdia" :-)
- lagniappe 2y ago
  because it's spelled encyclopedia
  - jamesog 2y ago
    US English spells it as encyclopedia, British English spells it as encyclopaedia.
- bbor 2y ago
  Fascinating! This is why I stick with nice, clean structural linguistics, this applied stuff gets sticky. I just confirmed on Youtube that the (some?) British people do indeed pronounce "Aesthetic" as "ah-stet-ic" not "ee-stet-ic", and upon diving a bit, it seems that the rule is "don't ask for a rule, you fool! It's 'e' now except for when it isn't." Thanks for the interesting tidbit! The letter æ was used in Old English to represent the vowel that's pronounced in Modern English ash, fan, happy, and last: /æ/. Mostly we now spell that vowel with the letter a, because of the Great Vowel Shift. When æ appears in writing Modern English, it's meant to be a typographic variant of ae, and is pronounced the same as that sequence of vowel letters would be. So Encyclopaedia or Encyclopædia, no difference. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70927/how-is-%C3%A6-supposed-to-be-pronounced https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70927/how-is-%C3... Highly recommend the protracted arguments in the comments, that's a wonderfully pedantic StackExchange. Big shoutout to someone in 2012 defining "NLP" as an unusual word -- how the world has changed! It's only a matter of time before they open an AP/IB course in NLP...
  - jamesog 2y ago
    "Aesthetic" gets even stickier! In the UK I tend to more commonly hear it pronounced as "es-thetic". The Great Vowel Shift indeed makes written English much more confusing than it perhaps should be. English is already a messy hodge-podge of a language, then our writing system started to get standardised (or standardized, if you're American!) right as pronunciation started to change, leading to the written version of words suddenly no longer being anything like the pronunciation.
everfrustrated 2y ago
I pedantically use day-mon (working/servant spirit) to distinguish from dee-mon (evil spirit) but I suspect I'm very much in the minority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon I've never found any significance to associate the unix term with Demons and consider it a mis-association.
- iwaztomack 2y ago
  Don't let MAGA hear you... they'll start banning and burning linux boxes.
_gotb 2y ago
Dae-mon, ah-ah-aah.

dcow 2y ago

I believe it officially is pronounced the same as demon. But colloquially I hear a lot of (and sometimes find myself using) “damon”.

whartung 2y ago
I’m in the Matt Damon camp. Always pronounced it that way, never really gave it much thought. Just seems “right” to me.
- JadeNB 2y ago
  And now we can perhaps hash out whether the `lib` in `/usr/lib` is pronounced with a long or short 'i'. I hope I'm not the only one who pronounced it the first way with no real thought, and never noticed until I heard someone else say it with a long 'i' that that was obviously the logical pronunciation.
  - dpassens 2y ago
    Surely the logical pronunciation is the way you'd pronounce it in library, so a long 'ai' rather than any kind of 'i'? Though I personally always use the short 'i'. I was going to justify that by saying it's the same as /usr/bin, but that's also short for binaries, so should also be an 'ai'.
    - macintux 2y ago
      I've been pronouncing it with the short 'i' for 30 years, but mainly, possibly only, in my head. In 1998 I started a new job, and my boss pronounced "URL" as "earl". That threw me for a loop, had to fight my way through our first conversation before I figured out what he was saying.
      - bitwize 2y ago
        I pronounce API as "appy", which sometimes draws quizzical looks (people think I'm using next-level cutesy slang for "application"). But I never could do the "earl" thing. Or "sequel".
    - JadeNB 2y ago
      > Surely the logical pronunciation is the way you'd pronounce it in library, so a long 'ai' rather than any kind of 'i'? Yep, that's what I meant to say with: > … never noticed until I heard someone else say it with a long 'i' that that was obviously the logical pronunciation. But maybe the sentence structure was too tortured for it to be clear what I was saying. > Though I personally always use the short 'i'. I was going to justify that by saying it's the same as /usr/bin, but that's also short for binaries, so should also be an 'ai'. Oh, shoot, even after I noticed the logical pronunciation of "lib" (long 'i') it never occurred to me that the same applied to "bin". I guess I just can't say any paths out loud any more.
      - fwip 2y ago
        Perhaps the difference for you is that "bin" is already an English word with an official pronunciation. Personally, I also use short-i for "lib," because I tend to pronounce shortenings of text as if they were words themselves.
      - saltcured 2y ago
        Do you pronounce the vowel in /var as in "bar" or as in "bare"? Also, for those who try to pronounce everything rather than spell them out, where does it end? I now have a newly discovered, morbid interest in how such folks say path elements like "selinux", "httpd", and "pgsql"...
        JadeNB 2y ago
        > Do you pronounce the vowel in /var as in "bar" or as in "bare"? Ha, they're everywhere!
      - dpassens 2y ago
        > that's what I meant to say Ah, that makes sense. I thought you meant long 'i' as in extending the duration of the 'i' sound, like in 'beep' vs 'bip'.
  - brianmurphy 2y ago
    I have always pronounced lib like the word liberal. I was mind-blown the first time I heard someone pronounce etc as "et-see". et-see rolls off the tongue so much better than ee-tee-see that it makes perfect sense now.
    - emmelaich 2y ago
      I've pronounced it as `etcet` as short for `et cetera`. But that's probably my Australian habit of shortening everything.
- bbor 2y ago
  Hard agree. It's an archaic word, it seems a shame not to revel in that fact whenever you use it! I've been using "automata" a lot recently, and that's another one that is just more fun the unusual way. Also it helps that it's clear either way -- no one will be confused upon hearing "daymon" even if they're not used to it, unlike "etsee", "user-slash-libe", "user-slash-bine". Or, god forbid, "oo-zir slash"...

jamesog 2y ago

It should more properly be written as dæmon. The æ ("ash") character is usually pronounced more like "ee", as in encyclopædia. I've never heard anyone say "encycloPAYdia" :-)

lagniappe 2y ago
because it's spelled encyclopedia
- jamesog 2y ago
  US English spells it as encyclopedia, British English spells it as encyclopaedia.
bbor 2y ago
Fascinating! This is why I stick with nice, clean structural linguistics, this applied stuff gets sticky. I just confirmed on Youtube that the (some?) British people do indeed pronounce "Aesthetic" as "ah-stet-ic" not "ee-stet-ic", and upon diving a bit, it seems that the rule is "don't ask for a rule, you fool! It's 'e' now except for when it isn't." Thanks for the interesting tidbit! The letter æ was used in Old English to represent the vowel that's pronounced in Modern English ash, fan, happy, and last: /æ/. Mostly we now spell that vowel with the letter a, because of the Great Vowel Shift. When æ appears in writing Modern English, it's meant to be a typographic variant of ae, and is pronounced the same as that sequence of vowel letters would be. So Encyclopaedia or Encyclopædia, no difference. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70927/how-is-%C3%A6-supposed-to-be-pronounced https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70927/how-is-%C3... Highly recommend the protracted arguments in the comments, that's a wonderfully pedantic StackExchange. Big shoutout to someone in 2012 defining "NLP" as an unusual word -- how the world has changed! It's only a matter of time before they open an AP/IB course in NLP...
- jamesog 2y ago
  "Aesthetic" gets even stickier! In the UK I tend to more commonly hear it pronounced as "es-thetic". The Great Vowel Shift indeed makes written English much more confusing than it perhaps should be. English is already a messy hodge-podge of a language, then our writing system started to get standardised (or standardized, if you're American!) right as pronunciation started to change, leading to the written version of words suddenly no longer being anything like the pronunciation.

everfrustrated 2y ago

I pedantically use day-mon (working/servant spirit) to distinguish from dee-mon (evil spirit) but I suspect I'm very much in the minority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon I've never found any significance to associate the unix term with Demons and consider it a mis-association.

iwaztomack 2y ago
Don't let MAGA hear you... they'll start banning and burning linux boxes.

_gotb 2y ago

Dae-mon, ah-ah-aah.