I’m doing a course on Pluralsight about WCF (a Microsoft platform for connected services).
The teacher/presenter has this annoying habit of shortening “W” to “dub”, and “HTTP” to “HTP”. So this sentence:
“WCF also supports SOAP over HTTP.”
will come out as:
“Dub C F also supports soap over H T P.”
At first I was listening to the course at 150% speed, so I figured it was a speed thing. But no, even at normal speed, he does this.
Shouldn’t he at least give some up-front warning that he speaks funny, especially in a training context? Or are these usual contractions in English tech speech?
The radio station where I used to work had a big sign above the mic that read, “There is an L in double-you!” Hearing it said any other way grates on my ears, unless you’re talking about Bush the Younger.
Abbreviating the letter W as “dub” is not new, by any means, at least not in the computing community. Some years ago, there was a computer and video gaming show that I used to watch, on an obscure TV network called G4. Anyway, one of the hosts was named Tina Wood. She always used the nickname “T-Dub.”
It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that this nickname was derived from her initials. Tina Wood. T.W. T-Dub.
A bit of Googling tells me that that show ended in 2005. So this abbreviation is at least 12 years old, and probably older.
I assume this comes from the fact that “w”, one letter, takes three syllables to pronounce. “WWW” is nine syllables to say, which is kind of ridiculous.