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RE: two minor pet peeves



To me, "mud" is that brown stuff you get when you mix dirt and water;
likewise, "moo" is the sound that a cow makes.  

"MUD", even when used to refer to servers not written by Richard Bartle ---
a usage which I think is too widespread to be ignored (like the
popular-media definition of "hacker") --- is still an acronym and thus
should indeed be all-caps.  (... except that in HTML you should do
<small>MUD</small> rather than MUD since it looks better...)

Admittedly, there's ample precedent for people getting sloppy, e.g., talking
about 
  Basic, Lisp, Algol, Fortran, Emacs, Moo,... 
when they really mean
  BASIC, LISP, ALGOL, FORTRAN, EMACS, MOO,... 
(or, to be excruciatingly accurate,
  BASIC, LisP, AlgoL, ForTran, EMacs, MOO,...), 
or, for that matter, 
  PASCAL, SCHEME,... 
instead of 
  Pascal, Scheme,... 
(since these are *not* acronyms).  

Note that in no case has the capitalization been lost, however.

To be sure, I wouldn't mind having a different word available for MUDs in
the generic/class sense, if for no other reason than that I don't get
strange looks when I try to describe to non-MUD people what LambdaMoo and
JHM and Waterpoint are...
Unfortunately, none come to mind at the moment.

I agree entirely about "player" vs. "user".

> ----------
> From: 	Doug Orleans[SMTP:dougo@ccs.neu.edu]
> Sent: 	Monday, January 05, 1998 10:39 PM
> To: 	mcp-dev@research.att.com
> Subject: 	two minor pet peeves
> 
> Two nitpicky pet peeves of mine, present in the current draft:
> 
>     1. "MUD" vs. "mud"-- I prefer to use the latter to refer
>        generically to the class of shared-virtual-world-thingies,
>        leaving the former to refer specifically to Bartle's Multi-User
>        Dungeon program.
> 
>     2. "player" vs. "user"-- similarly, I prefer to use the latter as
>        a generic term for a mud participant, whereas the former is a
>        term specific to certain types of mud servers.
> 
> Since "player" only occurs once, in section 1.1 ("the player's I/O
> channel"), whereas "user" occurs several times in the rest of the
> document, I'm assuming it's just an oversight.  Does anyone else agree
> with me on the "MUD" thing, though?
> 
> --Doug
>