Fun_People Archive
22 Jun
ASCII is older than you think!

Date: Thu, 22 Jun 95 13:47:04 PDT
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: ASCII is older than you think!

Forwarded-by: squeeze@omni.voicenet.com (Bob Stein)
Forwarded-by: rec.humor.funny
From: lee@sq.com (Liam Quin)

I was looking at my 1837 copy of Johnson's Dictionary, when I came across
the following entry:

        ASCII  n s. [from the greek]  Those people who,
        at certain times of the year, have no shadow at
        noon; such are the inhabitatants of the torrid
        zone.
_____________________________________________________________________________
[Lest you think this is a joke, a much more recent dictionary, my 1941 Funk &
Wagnall's Standard Universal Dictionary of the English Language (the first one
I checked in) has:

	as'cians [I can't reproduce the pronunciation very well with ascii,
	    but the c is soft, as in "ash'yanz"]  n. pl. Shadowless men;
	    inhabitants of the torrid zone, who twice in the year cast
	    no shadow at noon.   a'sci-i.

This puts "ascii" right up there with "email" as a current, high-tech word with
a nearly-forgotten, no-tech past...  -psl]

© 1995 Peter Langston