On Monday, 19 January 2015 at 22:02:37 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
On 1/19/15 4:43 PM, ponce wrote:
On Monday, 19 January 2015 at 16:30:14 UTC, Russel Winder via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Mon, 2015-01-19 at 15:31 +0000, ponce via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
[…]
Dunno, maybe an US person would tell if "Utah" would be
preferable to
"UT".
I guess it depends if you want non USA people to know the
location. I
appreciate that everyone inside the USA knows all the state
codes, and
knows that if you do not specify a country, of course it is
in the USA.
However, for people not in the USA this knowledge is absent –
though
people in the USA haven't really cottoned on to that yet.
Basically I think D should be a global thing, not a
USA-centric one.
My view point:
- I didn't know what UT meant myself
- I didn't know where the city was anyway
- it seems customary for Americans to see city names with the
State code
- but, being a conference in the US, it is expected more US
people are
expected to fill the seats
- "Orem, Utah" might feel dumb to americans, dunno
Spelling out the state is not "dumb", it's perfectly
legitimate. Almost nobody ever uses this notation, as the state
codes are pretty well known.
However, longer state names may be more awkward in a concise
badge graphic (Utah doesn't suffer from this).
The thing is, there are several state abbreviations that always
confuse people. For instance AL is Alabama, but could be Alaska
(AK) and AK might be confused as Arkansas (AR), which may be
confused as Arizona (AZ).*
:)
I think bottom line, it's not a slight against any
non-Americans to use a US custom in the US, and it's also not
that difficult to find out what it really means.
-Steve
* disclaimer: before posting this I felt compelled to look all
this up to make sure I got it right :D
Not being a professor of English, this may be out of date, but
common advice is to use traditional abbreviations rather than
postal abbreviations unless a zip code follows. For Utah, the
traditional abbreviation is 'Utah'.
