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.
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