Re: Two trivial questions

[G. Branden Robinson]

[post-quotation word count: 565]

At 2021-10-26T23:44:15-0400, Peter Schaffter wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 26, 2021, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
> > > Is there a correct pronunciation of groff?
> > 
> > Groff's forebears were christened en-roff and tee-roff, so an
> > old-timer from Bell Labs instinctively reads groff as a disyllable.
> > Could groff's originator, James Clark, have read it otherwise?
> 
> So is it worth giving the established pronunciation in the videos'
> comments, or should language be left to do its thing and evolve?

I'm still the new guy here in a lot of ways, and I've found my own usage
shifting erratically between the two.  When I first showed up I mentally
pronounced it "groff" (the monosyllable) just like the philistines with
their YouTube channels, and I still do sometimes, but when speaking
aloud to others about this thing that I work on, I sometimes find myself
deferring to the "accepted" pronunciation.

The surname "Groff", with which some unknown quantity of users will be
familiar before they encounter our software, long predates computerized
typesetting.  To the misfortune of our Web search efforts, it is borne
by a couple of actors, at least one of whom is pretty famous, at least
among some demographic groups (say, his own age or younger).

I'd further argue that the GNU roff project has indulged some puns that
make the "jee-roff" pronunciation an unstable equilibrium that we might
expect to fail.  We have groff-related tools, grog and the output
drivers, all of which[1] _seem_ to pull in the other direction.

"Grotty" and "grog" are (at least) semi-standard English words, the
latter a term for rotgut whiskey (or a ration of rum allocated to scurvy
tars), and they thereby encourage a similar morphological approach to
"groff".

Do the old-timers instinctively pronounce grops(1) "jee-roe-pee-ess"?

I pronounce the "gro-" prefix on all of our output drivers as "grow",
and except for "grotty", spell out the remaining letters since they're
all initialisms anyway.

My guess is that the momentum will prove to be away from the disyllable.
Our attempts to resist this will meet a further difficulty: our attempts
at issuing corrections in writing meet with the misfortune that both of
the two most common ways of doing so stumble over ambiguous readings in
English, just as the interjection "Geez!" (or "Jeez!") does.[2]  When we
say "gee-roff", does the first syllable more closely resemble "ghee"
(that one might cook Indian food with) or the unit of acceleration
experienced in aerobatic maneuvers?  When we say "jee-roff", we may
think ourselves on firmer ground, but for every jeering, jersey-clad,
jejune jellybean-jerker in the world, there's a person coming from a
background in the French, German, or Spanish languages, familiar with
English's aggressive adoption of loan words, who may be left wondering
if we're suggesting "zhee-roff" or "yee-roff" instead.

Consequently, for all of my inclinations as a prescriptivist, I find
myself leaving my watermarked pad in its locked drawer in this case.

Let the YouTubers mispronounce, if that is in fact what they're doing.
I appreciate the publicity they're giving our little project, and if in
so doing they encourage more people to read our documentation and gain a
better command of the practical _usage_ of groff, I confess I'll be
pleased.

Regards,
Branden

[1] except for "gxditview", which doesn't encourage spoken pronunciation
    even slightly
[2] I use the latter because it's a minced oath for "Jesus Christ": in
    popular (and characteristically hazy) notions of soteriology, even
    such mincing brings one nonzero ignominy in the sight of the divine
    Judge, Whose anger can evidently be mollified in proportion to one's
    efforts at obfuscation, despite His perfect knowledge of one's
    innermost heart.  Thus the popularity of the absurd rendering
    starting with a "g", which itself begins a great many _other_ minced
    oaths for the Name.  As Bart Simpson said, "well, you're damned if
    you do, and you're damned if you don't".

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