Apparently, though unproven, at 19:07 on Friday 20 August 2010, Mike Edenfield did opine thusly:
> On 8/20/2010 11:40 AM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote: > > As to the thingies, I enjoyed discovering that to many people a > > parenthesis is not a glyph or punctuation mark, but instead the contents > > of the language set aside in one way or another. I had always regarded > > parentheses as the round glyphs (), but this turns out to be normative > > primarily in mathematics, computer programming languages and similar > > fields. But I find several competing meanings and sources using > > http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=parenthesis&ia=luna > > <http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=parenthesis&ia=luna> > > In American English usage, the three forms of puncutation mark have > distinct names. Contrary to previous assertions, these names are not > informal; authoritative American English dictionaries like M-W define > "bracket", "brace", and "parenthesis" separately as punctuation marks. > > In British English they're all called "brackets", e.g. square, curly, or > round. Yuck. Too many times I've had someone dictate text and this happens: Them: <blah> <blah> open bracket <blah> <blah> .... Me: Which bracket? Them: huh? Me: You said open bracket. What kind of bracket? Them: Curly? Me: You mean brace. Them: Yes, that's the one! Is that what it's called then? Way too many words. Just give the bloody thing a name. Like Eskimo's with 20+ words for different kinds of snow. Say "snow" to any Eskimo, see what happens :-) > > The Romance languages are somewhat varied, but they mostly use the Greek > word parenthesis to derive their term for () marks; in some cases, that > word is use for *all* brackets; in other cases [] and {} have separate > terms: > > () = parenthèses (Fr.), paréntesis (Sp.), parentesi tonde (It.) > [] = crochets (Fr.), corchetes (Sp.), parentesi quadre (It.) > {} = accolades (Fr.), corchetes (Sp.), parentesi graffe (It.) > > For what it's worth, Unicode defines U+0028 AND U+0029 as "LEFT > PARENTHESIS" and "RIGHT PARENTHESIS" (also "OPENING PARENTHESIS" and > "CLOSING PARENTHESIS"). > > --Mike -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
