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hpr_transcripts/hpr3753.txt

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+Episode: 3753
+Title: HPR3753: Some thoughts on "Numeronyms"
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3753/hpr3753.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:56:54
+
+---
+
+This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3753 for Wednesday the 21st of December 2022.
+Today's show is entitled Some Thoughts on Numeron Eams.
+It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 12 minutes long.
+It carries an explicit flag.
+The summary is aka Alphanumeric acronyms, Alphanumeric abbreviations or numerical contractions.
+Hello everybody.
+This is Dave Morris for Hacker Public Radio.
+Welcome.
+I'm going to do a quick show today, hope is quick anyway.
+We're getting very low on shows so please step up if you can.
+This one is about Numeron Eams, it's a word I discovered recently and I've called
+it some thoughts on Numeron Eams, I'll explain what they are in a minute.
+So what prompted this was a discussion with Mike Ray about accessibility and he was
+using the term A11y, which we all, well many of us were puzzled by, I certainly was,
+and we're pronouncing it Ali and things of that sort.
+So I've been wondering about these.
+These are built from, these are the Numeron Eams and they're built from the first letter
+of the word followed by a number and the last letter where the number represents the
+count of letters between the start and end.
+So accessibility is A11 that is Y, but I found this A11y thing very, very clunky, it's
+much easier to say accessibility than is to say A11y, looked it up, just recently found
+the Wikipedia article and as I say it's called a Numeron Eam, so a name with a number in
+it.
+They may be referred to as alphanumeric acronyms or alphanumeric abbreviations or numerical
+contractions.
+You can see all of those being contracted, eh?
+The Wikipedia points out that these types of abbreviations are almost always used to
+refer to their computing sense.
+So G11n for globalization and that's in the context of computing, not in the general
+context.
+Anyway, this thing, this abbreviation method, jared with me a little bit and except me
+thinking, fully sympathise with the motivation behind using A11y to mean accessibility.
+I do find it old and counterintuitive, often find myself pondering the acceptability of
+this type of abbreviation.
+How many other words in common English fit patterns like this I wonder?
+What a few I would expect.
+How does this affect the admissibility of such abbreviations?
+Not only they adventurously strange to my simple brain, but I find them to be aesthetically
+displeasing.
+My experiments with the standard Linux dictionary, looking for words that fit this pattern,
+I find firmly supportive of this view.
+I described this experiment later.
+Algebraically it is to be expected there are many dictionary words of 13 characters which
+start with A and then with Y, looking at them allegorically such numerous names can
+vary little meaning except in very limited context since the motivation seems to be to reduce
+the need to type long words.
+Alternatively they were accepted by data entry software and expanded automatically, but
+a case could be made for applicability, but only one word could be assigned to a numerous
+name.
+In my mind there is a certain artificiality in the use of these abbreviations.
+So you might wonder what I was going on about in the last bit, a strange running-bling
+section.
+This is my admittedly small joke to try and use as many of the words that match the A11Y
+pattern, which I made total sense, so there was a certain element of sense.
+So I've transformed that paragraph and put A11Y in all the cases, and I'm not going
+to read them out, maybe it should have done, but I don't think I want to.
+But you can look at it, it's in the notes and you can see what it looks like.
+So being a computer programmer and enjoying writing in bash, I had to write a bash script
+to do some of this stuff.
+So I've given an example, it's just a three line thing, which is basically a while loop.
+And what it does is it scans the file user-shared-dicked words and picks out words which match
+the A11Y pattern.
+In other words they need to start with an A and have 11 letters after that and then
+a Y and then that's it.
+So the little script, which is actually just a sort of command line, I think you type
+in one line, but I've laid it out, so it's easier to read.
+It writes the word that it's found and the numerator and num that's generated from it,
+which it computes, so it's unnecessary in this case because they all generate the same
+numerator.
+I did this way because I want to apply the algorithm to other words.
+There's a process substitution which uses GREP to scan the user-shared-dicked words
+file, and it actually removes all instances or it doesn't return any instances that end
+in apostrophe S.
+It seems to be quite a lot of them there, but I've said this before, not quite sure why.
+Then it pipes that result to another GREP, which looks for this pattern of A, followed
+by 11 letters and a Y, and that is being fed into a Y loop, which reads into a variable
+called word, and then the contents of word are printed out using print F, and then the
+first letter of that word, the num, the count of the letters in the word minus 2, and then
+the final letter of the word, and this all uses bashes quite neat character string manipulation
+features, and also the ability to count the length of a other word.
+So I also wrote one which looks for all words which are 8 to 20 letters long, picks 20
+of those at random, and then applies this same numeronym algorithm, and it's pretty
+similar except that the process substitution at the end is so different, it's looking
+for words of 8 to 20 characters in length, and it uses the Schuff command to get a random
+selection of 20 out of this long. I've used this trick in loads of my bash episodes,
+so nothing new here really. I give an example of some of the words, non-political turns out
+to be N, 10, L, and optimizations is O, 11, S, and so on, you know. Have fun with this
+if you find it musing it musing me, so that's why I did that.
+So in researching for this episode I came upon an extremely long word which I found on Wikipedia,
+and it's a fake word, it's a made-up word is meant to represent some sort of lung disease,
+but it's not a thing that actually exists, and I'm going to try and read it and give myself
+a sort of crypt sheet to do it with, but I've also linked to the spoken version of it on Wikipedia,
+which incidentally I disagree with it, no mind. The way I pronounce this is Numenol,
+pertaining to Nulums, ultromicroscopic, very very tiny,
+silico, relating to silicaceous dusts and stuff. Volcano, relating to volcanic ash,
+cogniosus, Numenol, ultromicroscopic, silico-volcano, cogniosus. So I think this is made up for a
+quiz or something. I applied the algorithm of turning it into a numero-nim, and it turns up
+with P43s. So here's my conclusion then, numero-nims don't be able to do it when you're already
+gathered them. Notwithstanding my little jokes above, I know the proposal is not to replace all
+longer words with them, this would cause chaos. However, as a means of denoting long words, this
+seems wrong. I assume that their evolution occurs like this. We use a word often in a particular
+context. The word is long and not easy to type. With a sake of speed and to avoid typographic errors,
+we make a numero-nim. We tell the world that i18n, as an example, means internationalisation.
+Those in the know have no problems with it, but many people who are encountered later,
+encounter it later, puzzle over it, as I'm doing here. It seems fair to say that this obscure
+process has fulfilled the need to abbreviate this awkwardly long word, in the limits of the
+context where it's evolved. Whether it's not conveyed information very well, it has mainly
+benefited those who write or read documentation relating to the context. It's hard to speak
+it is basically the thing. Many editor and word process replications have the facility of expanding
+abbreviations like this in my experience. I use them all the time and there's an abbreviation
+command where you can say use this sequence of letters to signify this phrase or word or whatever,
+and I've got loads of them. There's a very nice plug-in which does a really good job,
+so I can point you to if you're interested. I'd rather use this than embed the coded abbreviation
+into the language. On the other hand, I'm okay with the pneumo thingy being replaced by P43s,
+so I must just be, I've still got a lot of people, but I must confess that I had a similar
+reaction to XKCD's exercise in using a limited number of words to explain things. He did a thing
+called Upgoer5, which explains the Saturn 5, which he says is explained using only the
+ten hundred words people use the most often. He might disagree with me about what I'm saying here,
+feel free to add a comment to the show or, indeed, record a show of your own. In my links,
+I have included all this stuff that I've mentioned, and also one of my favourite fake words,
+which is the Welsh village, which I used to be able to pronounce very, very, very long,
+and abbreviate to L64H. I'm not going to try and pronounce it. I can do it if I'm,
+if I'm going to give myself enough time if I run up to it slowly, but I've been there,
+and one of the, it's quite a nice little village in the north of Wales on the island of Anglesy.
+You go into the station, you can buy a platform ticket, which is just a thing that used to happen.
+You want to get on a platform to wave by to people, and it's extremely long because it's got
+the entire name on it, and this was, this name was created in order to get more tourists to visit
+, apparently. So, which, you know, the problem? It's the second longest place name in Europe,
+might be. Well, the world, I don't know, check the Wikipedia page I've linked to.
+Okay, that's me, then, I've finished, and looking forward to any feedback you might have. Okay, bye.
+You have been listening to Hecker Public Radio, at Hecker Public Radio, does work.
+Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording
+broadcast, you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
+Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an onsthost.com, the internet archive, and our
+sims.net. On this otherwise status, today's show is released on our creative commons,
+Attribution 4.0 International License.