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Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2012 16:40:24 -0600 (MDT)
From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>
To: Erich Dollansky <erichfreebsdlist@ovitrap.com>
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Cc: doc@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: FDP and compound words
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On Sat, 28 Jul 2012, Erich Dollansky wrote:

> On Sat, 28 Jul 2012 14:39:52 +0200
> Marc Fonvieille <blackend@freebsd.org> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 06:00:01PM -0600, Warren Block wrote:
>>> The FDP word list at
>>> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/writing-style-word-list.html
>>> specifies the formats for several words that are often used as a
>>> single compound word in our documentation.  For example:
>>>
>>> file system
>>> disk label
>>> mail server
>>> name server
>>> web server
>>>
>>> Actually, I think the single-word versions of at least the first
>>> two are more correct.  Some searching found this:
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_noun_and_adjective
>>>
> the list shows the correct spelling.

I was hoping for something like "...and here's why."

>>> There's an excellent example: "darkroom".  A darkroom is a
>>> different thing than a dark room.
>
> Aren't we lucky that Free BSD and FreeBSD mean the same.

The first could be OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD, or FreeBSD.  They are 
all Free BSDs.

The second combines the adjective with the noun to make a specific noun 
that refers to only one thing.

The Open Help conference will be having a session on an open source 
style guide in about a week.  I plan to bring up this question there, to 
get viewpoints from people from other open source projects.