The future of Emacs, Guile, and Emacs Lisp

Posted Oct 23, 2014 15:33 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576)
In reply to: The future of Emacs, Guile, and Emacs Lisp by Jandar
Parent article: The future of Emacs, Guile, and Emacs Lisp

>since the 'b' within the word "blob" means binary I don't use the abomination "binary blob".

Trivia time:
Although it is sometimes playfully backronymed, 'blob' is not actually an acronym, but a standard English word (and for the benefit of non-native speakers who may be unaware: it's actually a fairly common one in widespread use).
Also, when it was first backronymed, the 'b' did not stand for 'binary', but for 'basic'.

The future of Emacs, Guile, and Emacs Lisp

Posted Oct 24, 2014 15:01 UTC (Fri) by hirnbrot (guest, #89469) [Link] (1 responses)

The Simpsons actually had a bit called "Married To The Blob", which was a reference to the earlier (1958) horror film called "The Blob".

So the word is at least older than UNIX.

The future of Emacs, Guile, and Emacs Lisp

Posted Oct 24, 2014 17:06 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Samuel Johnson's famous dictionary mentions a blob as being "a word used in some counties for a bubble".

Two modern dictionaries I have both suggest the word first appeared in the 15th century. If so, that's before Early Modern English stabilised. So as far as the language we use today is concerned, the word "blob" has always existed although its exact meaning has drifted of course.

The future of Emacs, Guile, and Emacs Lisp

Posted Oct 24, 2014 18:30 UTC (Fri) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link] (2 responses)

Basic Large OBject?

When was the last time someone mentioned "blob" on LWN (with or without the prefix "binary") where it hadn't referred to a Binay Large OBject?

The future of Emacs, Guile, and Emacs Lisp

Posted Oct 24, 2014 19:15 UTC (Fri) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]

The wikipedia article for "binary large object" (a term I wasn't previously familiar with) has an amusing link claiming that even in that database use it was never really an acronym:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110723065224/http://www.cval...

>>>The term blob, as Jim would point out, is not an acronym for anything.
>>
>>It's not Binary Large OBject?
>
>No, that was a marketing anti-acroynm invented after the fact because
>somebody thought 'blob' was unprofessional.

Blob's a common English word whose everyday meaning ("an indeterminate mass or shape", says google) already works just fine for describing opaque data.

The fact that I haven't seen anyone on lwn capitalize it like an acronym suggests none of us are thinking of the made-up acronym.

blob

Posted Oct 24, 2014 20:48 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Usually it is just referring to a blob of stuff. But if you're insistent on trying hard to explain all use of the word as a database term, I guess the clearest exception is a link to a review of Blob Wars, a video game about, well, blobs, some years ago.

All that's happened here is that you were walking around with a glitch in your internal dictionary. Happens to everybody. Humans mostly learn words not by purchasing a big book of definitions and reading it, but by inferring their meaning from context. Robert Browning got the idea this way from an old poem he'd read that "twat" meant some sort of headgear for senior nuns. So when he needed a word that rhymed nicely with "bats" in a religious context he picked "twats" and now generations of English students get to laugh at his error when they read his poetry at undergraduate level. You are not likely to be so unlucky.