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Main Area and Open Discussion => General Software Discussion => Topic started by: lanux128 on April 16, 2007, 08:47 PM
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this guy is quite adamant that we call Windows components the proper way or else... ;)
One of the most common errors is to refer to the Taskbar Notification Area as the "tray" or the "system tray". This has never been correct. If you find any documentation that refers to it as the "tray" then you found a bug.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/10/54831.aspx
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Some folks get quite anal about some stuff.
Now who don't know what your refering to when you say "system tray"?
As if there ain't enough speech police around. :-\
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Some folks get quite anal about some stuff.
Now who don't know what your refering to when you say "system tray"?
As if there ain't enough speech police around. :-\-Cpilot
Rather reminds me of the hand wringing and tut-tutting that goes on about applying the term "donationware" to mouser's software...
So, I'll yell it from the rooftops - mountaintops if I have to - I LOVE RUNNING DONATIONCODER DONATIONWARE IN MY SYSTEM TRAY :-*
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I thought the taskbar was where your apps go (icon and title), and the tray was the thing with the clock and the tiny icons.
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I thought the taskbar was where your apps go (icon and title), and the tray was the thing with the clock and the tiny icons.
-Deozaan
exactly, that is how i understand it.. however, this guy introduces a new complication by claiming that users call the taskbar as the tray then proceeding to forbid them from doing so.. oh, talk about information overload.. :)
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Perhaps true, but never-the-less, it is correct now due to the massive usage of "system tray".
Let me give some examples...
A "gentleman" is not a nice person. In fact, they're generally real bastards. Oh... But that's only if you use "gentleman" in the original sense that it means "land owner". The meaning changed.
When I was a little boy, my sister was a "slut". "Slut" originally meant "little girl" and had no sexual connotations. The word changed.
Similarly, the way "system tray" is used makes it acceptable. i.e. "System tray" = "taskbar notification area"
From the article:
"But why do you care? That's what everybody calls it now, may as well go with the flow."
How would you like it if everybody started calling you by the wrong name?
Summary: It is never correct to refer to the notification area as the tray. It has always been called the "notification area".
Well, really, who cares that much? It's too late to change the world. Everyone uses the wrong phrase. But if everyone calls something by a specific name, then that's what the name is *commonly*.
Whether or not it is correct is besides the point. If you call it by the correct name, will anyone understand what you're saying? I'd rather be understood than be "correct". It makes my life easier and makes the lives of the people I communicate with easier as well.
When I say "blah", I mean that thing over there. If everyone understands that, then there's no need for me to call it anything else. If they don't, then I'd better find out what they call it and use that term.
The article's argument seems very "unixy" in the sense that "A" and "a" are not the same for a file name, but on Windows they are the same. OK, well the unix world is correct. But people understand the Windows way better. Case insensitivity makes sense for most people. Why not just give in and communicate with people in a language that they understand? It would be insane for me to start typing my bad Korean here - nobody would understand, but I'd still be "right".
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When I was a little boy, my sister was a "slut". "Slut" originally meant "little girl" and had no sexual connotations. The word changed.
! How old are you, Renegade? On the west coast of Canada at no point in the last 50 years (that I am aware of) has calling a guy's little sister a slut been anything other than derogatory, inflammatory, and loaded with sexual connotations!
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omgwtfbbqandsuch!
in totally unrelated anal news:
(http://mein-bowl.de/systray.jpg)
no anal comments for my OS.
i'll contiue calling the windows thingy systray too, just because (virtually) everyone expects linux to be like windows, i expect windows to be like my beloved linux ;-)
ok, enough jokes for today :D
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Raymond Chen has the right to be anal, though...
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I'm a big word cop. Personally, I think I'll make an effort to call that thingy by the correct term: the "Taskbar Notification Area" or maybe the TNA for short.
'Course, at the same time, I also use the words Tomorry and Libary. ...I can thank Homer Simpson for those...
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TNA - has a nice ring to it, Hirudin (smirk, smirk, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more!)
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Ah, the pure humor, Darwin! ;)
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After reading Raymond's post about it a while back I started to try to use "System Notification Area" but I gave up and went back to "tray". Nobody understands WTF you mean and it's not exactly a catchy name.
Language changes. Things get nick-names. If you call somehing A and everyone else calls it B you can explain that it was originally called A but beyond that you've just got to deal with it, I think.
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I have forgotten where I found this - it's only a little off topic:
"English As A First Language"
We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes; but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes. One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, yet the plural of moose should never be meese. You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice; yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men, why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen? If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet, and I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet? If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those, yet hat in the plural would never be hose, and the plural of cat is cats, not cose. We speak of a brother and also of brethren, but though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him, but imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.
Some other reasons to be grateful if you grew up speaking English:
1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture.
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
8] At the Army base, a bass was painted on the head of a bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number.
19) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
21) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
22) I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt.
Screwy pronunciations can mess up your mind! For example...If you have a rough cough, climbing can be tough when going through the bough on a tree!
Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England.
We take English for granted.
But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?
Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wiseguy are opposites?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm goes off by going on.
If Dad is Pop, how's come Mom isn't Mop?
Enough!!!!
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Ah, the pure humor, Darwin!
Yes, fodder, it is my subtlety that draws people to me... :P
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I could get behind TNA. :Thmbsup:
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TNA sounds like some pro wrestling federation.. ;D Raymond Chen fails to realize even the terms windows, desktop, wallpaper are of metaphorical origin.. just like the way, in windows you adorn your "desktop" with "wallpaper" & you put away your "files" (not documents) into a "folder"..
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Stumbled on this little article (http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130923-page,1-c,linux/article.html) on slashdot today, and couldn't help but snicker because of the following quote:
There should now be a shiny red gem appearing in the notification area (Windows refugees, think "system tray") near the upper right of your screen. Right-clicking that icon gives you several useful options.
(emphasis is mine)
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Curt: Your post has just made me think of how the English language resembles Mandarin Chinese in that we use accents instead of tonal variation. For example, the difference between garbage and a verb meaning "to turn away something offered" is the difference between "refuse and refuse. See?
And so many more of those examples can be attributed to "borrowed" words, archaic terms that have changed meaning, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
gjehle: Hooray! Something that MS can't threaten to sue Linux users for! All your systray are belong to us!!11!!!
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T N A works for me.
"Man, your TNA is full of excess junk..."
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I'm all for a little more TnA on television. ;)
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It's a shame to see that somebody writing on MSDN could be so out of touch. Maybe he could check the listing of files on just about every Windows machine on the planet, with minor variations: C:\WINDOWS\system32\systray.exe
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It's a shame to see that somebody writing on MSDN could be so out of touch. Maybe he could check the listing of files on just about every Windows machine on the planet, with minor variations: C:\WINDOWS\system32\systray.exe
-Cavalcader
:greenclp:
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It's a shame to see that somebody writing on MSDN could be so out of touch. Maybe he could check the listing of files on just about every Windows machine on the planet, with minor variations: C:\WINDOWS\system32\systray.exe
-Cavalcader
He already addresses systray.exe in TFA...
Btw I call it "the tray" myself, but I still believe that Raymond Chen has the right to be pedantic about these issue.
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He already addresses systray.exe in TFA...-f0dder
Sort of. He says "I think the reason people started calling it the "system tray" is that on Win95 there was a program called "systray.exe" that displayed some icons in the notification area". Win95? This is 12 years later and it's still there. I guess that his making it sound like it was only around over a decade ago was what prompted me to ignore that part of his post.
Still, on rereading it, it sounds like he's saying that systray.exe only displays certain specific system status icons, and isn't a manager module (separate from Windows Explorer) for that area of the taskbar. If that's the case, I'll fall back to agreeing with most of the other folks here: language is about communication, and "system tray" is a more comfortable way to describe the specific Windows feature than "notification area". In my opinion, "notification area" is a technical description, not a name. However, I'd be willing to call it "status bar" or something else (not already in use) that's similarly casual and descriptive.
(As for that part of the taskbar, I sure hope somebody's redesigned it in Vista, because it's a very poorly designed, highly unreliaable UI in XP!)
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Pedantic or not in the long run I doubt it'll make a difference.
Common terminology is arrived at by consensus.
Case in point, in the 80's Xerox made some noise about using it's name as a verb.
As in xeroxing to mean making a copy. It never got anywhere because it became a common term for using a copy machine.
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Common terminology is arrived at by consensus.-Cpilot
exactly, words evolve as people use them.. any linguistic expert or dictionary compiler would vouch for this, even though he may not agree with the words.. btw, google is not tearing its hair off everything someone googles on the web.. :)
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I thought google was against it's name being used as a verb...
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20030620-162.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3006486.stm
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I thought google was against it's name being used as a verb...-f0dder
hehe.. google has proved that it is a corporate business after all.. so much for "do no evil".. :) thanks for clarifying, f0dder.. :up:
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hehe.. google has proved that it is a corporate business after all.. so much for "do no evil".. :)-lanux128
I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible to run a huge business and still put out a good product over the long haul. Still, ya gotta admit, protecting their investment in the company name is one of those necessary evils. Imagine how long it took some creative people to come up with the name Kleenex, and now it's about as generic as can be...
Whoops, wandering way offtopic. How about a Kleenex dispenser in the Notification Area? :P
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How about hoovering up a xerox of a kleenex that someone has written all over with a biro?
OK, so two of my two examples are common in British English... I don't care!
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Curt - just goes to show how smart you have to be to have a good command of the English Language! :Thmbsup:
I am teaching my neighbour's 9 year old (Afrikaans) Son, as his Father wants him to speak 'real' English and not the local variety!
I am British BTW...
;)
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When I was a little boy, my sister was a "slut". "Slut" originally meant "little girl" and had no sexual connotations. The word changed.
! How old are you, Renegade? On the west coast of Canada at no point in the last 50 years (that I am aware of) has calling a guy's little sister a slut been anything other than derogatory, inflammatory, and loaded with sexual connotations!
-Darwin
The examples there are more than just a few years old. A couple hundred or so. Never-the-less, the meaning of the word changed. Not in our lifetime, but still, it illustrates the point that the meanings of words (and what things are called) changes over time.
Another example would be "tissue" being called "kleenex" or "cola" being called "coke".
As yet another example, the origin of the word "f**k" comes from a word meaning "to thrust", as in to thrust with a sword. (Old Anglo-Saxon)
The above example with "slut" was meant for dramatic effect. I thought that was obvious in the context.
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As yet another example, the origin of the word "f**k" comes from a word meaning "to thrust", as in to thrust with a sword. (Old Anglo-Saxon)
-Renegade
You've heard that mp3 too? :)
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As yet another example, the origin of the word "f**k" comes from a word meaning "to thrust", as in to thrust with a sword. (Old Anglo-Saxon)
-Renegade
You've heard that mp3 too? :)
-f0dder
Actually, I got that from a university class in Old Anglo-Saxon well before the George Carlin comedy routine. :)
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That's the guy who made that 60-minutes-ish monologue on "the meaning of the word f***"? I've been trying to track it down on and off :)
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It's not that long. I forget exactly how long it is - around 5~10 minutes I think. The guy is really smart though. Some of the most intelligent comedy out there.
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The above example with "slut" was meant for dramatic effect. I thought that was obvious in the context.
Yup - it was obviously meant for dramatic effect, I just read it as having changed over the course of your life, that's all.
Thanks for the clarification - I wasn't aware of that!
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60 minutes as in http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtml - there's always this old guy at the end who's doing a funny monologue :)
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60 minutes as in http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtml - there's always this old guy at the end who's doing a funny monologue :)
-f0dder
Aah...! Andy Rooney.
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Ah yeah, that's his name! - dunno if it's he who did the sketch I remember, but the voice reminded me of him.
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I actually appreciated learning this little nugget of info. I'm pretty particular myself, so I like this sort of thing. For example, I just learned that DVD originally stood for "Digital Versatile Disc" not "Digital Video Disc".
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The above example with "slut" was meant for dramatic effect. I thought that was obvious in the context.
Yup - it was obviously meant for dramatic effect, I just read it as having changed over the course of your life, that's all.
Thanks for the clarification - I wasn't aware of that!
-Darwin
Sorry - I misread what you meant. It never occurred to me that you were asking if I was 397 years old! :)
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As yet another example, the origin of the word "f**k" comes from a word meaning "to thrust", as in to thrust with a sword. (Old Anglo-Saxon)
I remember in Junior High School looking up dirty words in the oldest dictionaries I could find in the library. One of them said the word in question was a verb that meant "to hit".
Gives new insight to the phrase "I'd hit that..."
:duck: :run:
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As yet another example, the origin of the word "f**k" comes from a word meaning "to thrust", as in to thrust with a sword. (Old Anglo-Saxon) -Renegade
here is another source (http://vampus.blogspot.com/2005/08/fukka-focka-fuck.html) that traces the origin via a Scandinavian derivation of "focka" meaning to copulate.. :)
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Curt - just goes to show how smart you have to be to have a good command of the English Language! :Thmbsup: -CleverCat
In fact the two most difficult languages in the world are said to be Danish and Japaneese.
- Did you know that the English language has some 500 words from Danish...? ;)
A Nordic example (Danish, Dutch, German, English, Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic):
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As yet another example, the origin of the word "f**k" comes from a word meaning "to thrust", as in to thrust with a sword. (Old Anglo-Saxon) -Renegade
here is another source (http://vampus.blogspot.com/2005/08/fukka-focka-fuck.html) that traces the origin via a Scandinavian derivation of "focka" meaning to copulate.. :)
-lanux128
One of the most common probably derives from the same root as the Norwegian word fukka and the Swedish focka (to copulate), and was first recorded in the early 16th century.
That helps put things in perspective historically and it's easier to see how the original "to thrust / to stab" evolved into "focka/fukka" with that meaning, and then to our modern sense of it now.
And who said linguistics or history was boring? :)
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And who said linguistics or history was boring?-Renegade
yes, it doesn't have to be.. just check here (http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/history_of_words)..
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Webster online dictionary:
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=fuck
Etymology: akin to Dutch fokken to breed (cattle), Swedish dialect fokka to copulate
The Dutch verb is much older than the Swedish one and has no relation with the old English word for to thrust as far as I can find.
Some other words "borrowed" from Dutch:
apartheid easel cookie dapper dock landscape sketch still life filibuster loafer slim scrabble Santa Claus scone snoopy yacht yankee
and some things the English think about us...
Dutch courage: courage from a bottle
Dutch uncle: suger daddy
Dutch wife: pillow
Dutch gold: fools gold
Double Dutch : you know...
Dutch treat, Dutch party, Dutch auction....