Information Research Weblog

An offline message from John Lindsay, which he has given me permission to repeat here.

Tom, like the idea of the society for the restoration of archaic useful words. Would like to apply for membership, but perhaps we can have reciprocal membership with the Hyphen-Society?

The Hyphen-Society was set up to promote the smallest atomic unit of distortion in digital machines when searching, for example Anglo Saxon, Anglosaxon, Anglo-Saxon. Encyclopedia Britannica does a boolean or on the first :).

It might be true that the [space] is even smaller but one sometimes can't see it, and if you don't know whether the [space] is there or not, you can't tell whether it has distorted. I thought the "," might be smaller, but we have had comma delimited files for more than twenty years with books on databases telling you how to build a library catalogue and not noticing that cdf won't work on title, so nothing much has been learned there. I thought perhaps the "." might be more simple, but we already have that in what appears to be a very simple point, Dewey and UDC, so I came back to the Hyphen-Society.

Had a really good example yesterday of what we have to deal with. Went to Borders to buy a cd, and they have J.S. in one sequence and Js in another, but no J S or JS.

John Lindsay