Sorry, everyone, I know that the horse is long dead but my wife is a
tech writer:
On Thu, 2003-03-06 at 06:22, Gibson, Mark wrote:
Finally, last para of sectin 4.5, "Mnemonics appearing in the
Abstract"
and 'meaning of the mnemonics "IP" or "TCP" or "MIB"' -- you mean
acronym, not mnemonic.
Um, you mean abbreviation, not acronym. No such English word as ip,
tcp of mib as far as I know :) Mnemonic, ironically, is actually
closer in meaning since IP is kind of a de facto mnemonic for Internet
Protocol.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=abbreviate*1+0
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=mnemonic*1+0
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=acronym*1+0
"IP": _I_nternet _P_rotocol certainly qualifies as an acronym.
The difference between an acronym and a mnemonic is that in the former,
the letters used are really the first letters of the intended phrase.
While mnemonics often use the first letter of other words, they'll often
be unrelated to the subject. By way of an example that will make this
message marginally IETF related, there was a pre-CIDR thought to use the
208.0.0.0/8 address space as 12-bit wide network masks. The mnemonic
for this range was the "C#" class (C-sharp, for the black key between C
and D on a piano). It was abandoned for CIDR since we all realized that
this approach wouldn't, um, scale.