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Macintoshen (Was: Fonts to present phonology in IPA at web pages)

From:Tim May <butsuri@...>
Date:Thursday, March 21, 2002, 19:26
Keith Gaughan writes:
 > From: David Peterson [mailto:DigitalScream@AOL.COM]
 >
 > >     P.S.: Anyone heard of this practice of rendering the
 > > plural of Macintosh as Macintoshen?  Who dreamt this up?
 >
 > You should probably read this:
 > http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/Overgeneralization.html
 >
 > My theory is that some mac users found out about the -en
 > pluralisation and ran with it.

Damn, I was just about to post this.  But I concur.  Most probably,
the term came about through contact with Linux users, who frequently
refer to their computers as boxen.

Incidentally, recent versions of XFree86 (the windowing system used on
most Linux systems) display Windows-type TrueType fonts fine,
although installation tends to be a little trickier than on Windows
(there was some mention of cross-platform compatability in the history
of this thread, which I didn't reply to).