Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 07:40:57 +0100 From: Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk> Message-ID: <53EC59F9.2080203@lsces.co.uk> | In my book they are still timezones :) I don't gree with the "still", But I certainly agree with the conclusion - that is, timezone (as a single word) is now perfectly OK (as is filesystem). English has a long tradition of making combined words out of adjective/noun pairs when the object described is a significant, and often used, such that the pair appear together very frequently. Consider "afternoon" as an obvious example - a word now undisputably I think - has been for a very long time) yet it would once have been more correctly "after noon", which is exactly what it describes. There are lots more examples (several more afterxxx words, like afterthought, also backbone, bathroom, breakfast...) from long ago, but also others that have only formed more recently (eg: striptease, which a couple of hundred years ago didn't exist, and then when the "art" form appeared, was a "strip tease", but now has formed into a single word, and the separated form is rarely, if ever seen). Similarly backfire, broadsheet, cheerleader, and more ... examples are not hard to find (just don't count cases where a prefix or suffix happens also to be a word "bothersome politicians" and "bother some politicians" don't mean the same thing at all ... the "some" suffix has nothing to do with the word "some"... same for membership, etc). Also, there is a long tradition of new words forming in technical communities (especially medicine of course) and then later being exported to the community as a whole - so even if timezone (or filesystem) are not yet in widespread enough use outside the computing/timekeeping ommunities, there's no reason we can't keep using them, until they are. kre ps: to fit this message to the subject, I gave up demanding that data be treated as plural decades ago - treating it as an uncountable seems fine to me (and retire datum to the relics of words that have died) which means that "data" would always have a singular verb, regardless of how much data is being discussed. Alternatively it could turn into one of those words like sheep/fish which are their own plural (and are nothing like the uncountables). Which happens will depend upon how usage develops over the coming decades and longer - for now, just write whatever seems natural. And avoid fixing or criticising, what seems natural to others.