Tweedledee and Tweedledum _Agreed_ to have a fight. Someday soon some language will be the Lingua Chinoise and COBOL will start looking really "funny."
I just had the extreme pleasure of helping a colleague from Beijing doing some installation in z/OS, and she had never seen or touched a mainframe before. Ever. And just on her own she could work with everything from USS to JCL with zERO training in ISPF or JCL or anything. No training. Just looking through docs. I explained to her what SYSPROC meant and she got it right away... I still cannot believe it, but on the other hand, I it is just a machine. I'd love to hear Steve chime in on this, but I never thought I'd see the day that someone went from knowing a TSO command line's difference from UNIX, or batch, to ISPF so easily, just like it was, hmmm, what is the word I'm looking for.... A computer? ...a way a lone a last a loved a long the... -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Gilmore Sent: Monday, November 26, 2012 6:24 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Etymology 101; was Parsing Bill Fairchild wrote: <begin extract> As languages evolve, several aspects of any given word can change: the spelling, the pronunciation, consonantal voicing or unvoicing, vowel shifting, and even the meaning. <end extract> and of these the last is perhaps the most important. Geoffrey Chaucer described himself as 'lewd', by which he meant not that he had a preternatural interest in things sexual but that he was not a clergyman. Shakespeare repeatedly used the word "sad" to mean not sorrowful but [nearly] worthless, and there has been a colloquial recrudescence of this sense in recent years. When I began in this business "storage" mean only auxiliary|backing storage. Main storage was "memory", a usage that is certainly not obsolete and is preserved in acronyms like DRAM. If you want to know what a word or phrase means|meant with any precision you must associate a time and a place|dialect with your query. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
