On Wed, Feb 5, 2020 at 3:52 PM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:

> Frodo (Ted Kowalski) told me it was originally spelled, and pronounced,
> fuck, for good reason, but he soon realized it was going to be used by
> others and changed one letter. It was just letters after that.
>

Very often the novice Unix users learns how `rm -rf` works the hard way.
I've always preferred the spelling, `rm -fr` where I tell people that the
`fr` bit means, "fuck recursively."

        - Dan C.

On Thu, Feb 6, 2020 at 1:34 AM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> FWIW. When it was written, Ted and I used pronounced it as “fisk” (rhymes
>> with “disk”), but F. S. C. K. was always acceptable to my ears.  I admit I
>> smiled one time when I heard some one call it “f-sick” but that was not
>> considered the proper pronunciation.
>>
>> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
>> quite.
>>
>> > On Feb 5, 2020, at 3:45 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> >
>> > "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> At 2020-02-04T09:40:18+0100, Sijmen J. Mulder wrote:
>> >>> markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de> wrote:
>> >>>> Wikipedia writes that `ed' would be pronounced ``ee-dee'' (like
>> >>>> ``vee-eye''), is that what you english speakers do?
>> >>
>> >> Certainly not.  When one sees a command name that duplicates a
>> >> frequently-used diminituve of a common name, the brain is going to
>> >> select that preferentially.
>> >
>> > ISTR thinking of it and calling it e-d, along with r-m, l-n, m-v and
>> > the other two-letter commands.
>> >
>> >> (And did people really say "dee-eye-tee-roff" for "ditroff"?)
>> >
>> > I did ... Although it's "groff" and not "g-roff". :-)
>> >
>> > FWIW,
>> >
>> > Arnold
>>
>