On Fri, Mar 7, 2025 at 11:24 AM Robert Treat <rob@xzilla.net> wrote:
> everyday english/grammar; as an example, people would generally write
> "the dr. lasered the tumor" not "the dr. LASERed the tumor".
For the record, I wouldn't write either of those things if I wanted to
be certain of being understood. Using acronyms as verbs is inherently
fraught: it supposes that the reader both understands the acronym in
general and is able to pick up on what you're doing with it. If I say
that somebody got swatted, for example, you could either fail to know
what a SWAT team is (which I imagine is quite plausible in a
non-American context) or you could think that I just meant that they
were struck lightly with a rolled-up newspaper. Writing SWATted
instead of swatted makes it clear that an acronym was intended, but
you still have to know what the acronym means in order to understand
the sentence.
And, to me, that's the root of the issue here. Some of the
documentation references to toasting, detoasting, etc. are in sections
that specifically define that mechanism, but some are not. In
particular I see that a reference to "detoasted" has crept into the
ALTER TABLE documentation, a state of affairs that is very possibly my
fault. That kind of thing is probably always going to be a mess no
matter how you capitalize it, because the reader may not know the
term. You could link to the definition, but rewording the sentence is
often going to be even better. For example, in the specific context
where this is used in the ALTER TABLE documentation, "decompressed"
would be just as accurate as "detoasted" and easier to understand.
--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
