Apparently It’s Pronounced “goodle”
I ran across a 2005 post to gdal-dev today that blew my mind a little:GDAL, the big-name raster translator library, is supposed to be pronounced “goodle,” according to its developer, Frank Warmerdam. So you “jeedles” and us “jeedolls” need to straighten up and fly right.
June 13th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Heh. I don’t mind GDAL being goodle. What drives me nuts is blowing a perfectly good chance to say Ogre instead of OhhGeeArr.
-J
June 14th, 2007 at 5:00 am
No, you’re right. It could be worse. I admit that I get a little bit taken with the jargon, too. Ogre would be a nice one to be able to throw around, especially if you’re being overheard. On the other hand, saying anything that comes close to rhyming with googol means you’re going to have to explain that you’re not talking about Google. And if I’m in a library and I say something like “we’ll leave that part up to the GDAL library,” and I pronounce it like Warmerdam wants, it’s going to mean something very specific.
But I guess mostly I’m suffering from the shock of having been wrong for so long. Like learning how to really pronounce a word you’ve only seen in print (my wife, a linguist, always wanted to do research on this phenomenon within geek culture). I used to see the word hitherto a lot in things I would read, and in my mind I pronounced it hit-hair-toe.
June 14th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Well, I obviously didn’t grow up in the right crowd. I thought chauffeur was pronounced chaw-fer into my mid-teens
June 14th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Good point. The spelling reform people (Melvil Dewey among them) have a decent point. The language is fluid anyway, perhaps today moreso than in recent cultural memory.