i make a point to say "zero" when it is a zero. when people say "oh" when they give a phone number, it drives me up the fucking wall. it is not an o; it is a zero.

-noah

en zero tee cee ar ay pee

Noah wrote:i make a point to say "zero" when it is a zero. when people say "oh" when they give a phone number, it drives me up the fucking wall. it is not an o; it is a zero.

-noah

Let me ask: when they say, "oh" when giving a phone number, do you somehow confuse it for the letter "O", or do you correctly infer that they mean the number zero?

I've no doubt that you figured out that they meant the number. So what's the big deal? Language is meant to be used to convey meaning, and they successfully did that. Where's the confusion?

Languages evolve to survive. Restrict its ability to evolve and a language will go the way of Latin. I'm all for spelling correctness and typo avoidance, but seriously...is the English-speaking world going to crash through the surface of the Earth because someone used an understandable but untraditional way of describing a number?

stewie wrote:Languages evolve to survive. Restrict its ability to evolve and a language will go the way of Latin.

i can see it now. english will be destroyed because of accuracy.

-noah

Noah wrote:i can see it now. english will be destroyed because of accuracy.

-noah

I'm actually with stewie on this one. We constantly get new words into our lexicon because of outside influence.

When the Brits were colonizing everything in sight, they picked up words like "jungle" from Africa b/c, as we all know, there aren't any jungles in the UK, but they had to take a term that was used by locals to signify their new surrounding.

Rap music would be nothing without Indian language as both "thug" and "ganja" are brown people words.

I am digressing to a heavy degree here, but I wanted to illustrate that often times, words will be brought in to use as signifiers for new things, and in the case of the "oh/zero" debate, I feel that it is a perfectly acceptable use of a word. I think the "oh" may have come from a dialectical shorthand and is quite useful.

Anyway, not to be a total crab Noah, but it's hard to take your stance on "accuracy" in the English language seriously when you don't use capital letters.


best,

Faiz

i would contend that the use of "oh" to mean "zero" is entirely consistent with the process in which it's involved, namely, spelling out a number in a way that's much quicker than saying it the proper way. for example, i don't say that i live in zip code "sixty thousand, six hundred twenty-two", but rather, i say "six oh six two two". saying "six zero six two two" will convey the exact same information to anyone who is familiar with the process of spelling out numbers, but i will have shortened it slightly less than i could have. it would be fully proper of me to say i live in zip code six nil six two two, to save that extra syllable, but i would expect that would flip people out a lot more than just dropping the first syllable and shortening "zero" to "oh". i really don't think it's because they look alike. if that were the case, folks would maybe substitute the letter L for the number 1, or a g for the number 9. which is probably pretty rare.

seven billion, seven hundred thirty-five million, three hundred ninety-four thousand, four hundred ninety-five. that's the fax number for electrical.

also, i would not be surprised if the source of calling the key o instead of 0 was actually that o is short for operator.

In my field, we call your attitude "linguistic purism".

In short:
natural evolution of language is to democracy as
linguistic purism is to dictatorship

Language is probably one of the truest examples of democracy at work, in which the majority makes decisions on behalf of the entire group. This works in spite of the power and authority others might try to enforce.

Latin is actually an excellent example. The upper class tried to use the language to dominate the majority, and what happened? People were doing things like using "oh" instead of "zero", applying their own pronunciations and grammatical structures and making so many changes that, over time, it gave birth to a whole new set of languages, and then Latin itself died out.

Language is like a living creature. If it doesn't evolve, it dies out. But sure, go on and try to keep it in a cage if you like. The majority will always end up winning anyway. This is why "ain't" is in the dictionary now, folks.

By the people, for the people.

I use the telephone at work to take domestic and international orders from customers for vacuum tubes and electronic parts. Using the word 'zero' instead of 'oh' can help avoid confusion and mistakes, wether it's used to convey a tube or part # or a zip code.

Plus using 'oh' is just plain lazy.

Zero is too cool a word not to use.

Cheers,

I obsessively use "zero" when I mean zero and "oh" when I mean oh. I think it's more precise and as TheMilford noted, zero is too cool a word not to use. On the other hand, I dont care when others use "oh" to mean zero, unless of course they end up confusing me as a result.

This rarely happens.

What about "zed"? That's a super-cool word, I think.