From owner-freebsd-chat Sun Apr 9 8:33:55 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from peloton.runet.edu (peloton.runet.edu [137.45.96.205]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A14A737B537 for ; Sun, 9 Apr 2000 08:31:45 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from brett@peloton.runet.edu) Received: from localhost (brett@localhost) by peloton.runet.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA02404; Sun, 9 Apr 2000 11:25:49 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from brett@peloton.runet.edu) Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2000 11:25:49 -0400 (EDT) From: Brett Taylor To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav Cc: Rahul Siddharthan , Christian Weisgerber , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Spellings [was Re: BSDCon East] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Hi, On 9 Apr 2000, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: > Brett Taylor writes: > > If you think they were touchy about "hot dog" you can probably > > imagine the uproar when physicists started talking about "black > holes." I'll let you figure out what the French word for that is. > "trou noir". What's the problem? As I noted in some other message, I only know French as it pertains to biking so I don't know if that's the correct word, but apparently French physicists were annoyed when John Wheeler coined the word "black hole" because it translated to anus. (accounts of their annoyance can be found in a number of places, the one I can remember right now is Kip Thorne's _Black Holes, Wormholes and Time Warps_). Brett ***************************************************** Dr. Brett Taylor brett@peloton.runet.edu * Dept of Chem and Physics * Curie 39A (540) 831-6147 * Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics * Walker 234 (540) 831-5410 * ***************************************************** To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message