11 Jan
2024
11 Jan
'24
4:04 a.m.
Knuth opens his TeXbook, explaining TeX's origin and pronunciation.
“English words like ‘technology’ stem from a Greek root beginning with
the letters τεχ…; and this same Greek word means art as well as
technology. Hence the name TeX, which is an uppercase form of τεχ.”
He then indeed introduces blecchhh, but he doesn't connect it with the
absence of quality.
“Insiders pronounce the χ of TeX as a Greek chi, not as an ‘x’ so that
TeX rhymes with the word blecchhh.”
(I couldn't help noticing that in my 1989 edition of the book, ellipsis
after τεχ appears to be set as three periods ‘...’ rather than a real
ellipsis ‘…’. The (modern) Greek words for art and technology are
τέχνη (techni) and τεχνολογία (technologia), respectively.
Diomidis
On 10-Jan-24 20:50, tuhs(a)cuzuco.com wrote:
No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two
non-troff options on
the software side were -
1) TeX. From Donald Knuth, which means tau epsilon chi, pronounced tech
not tex. The urban legend was upon seeing an inital copy of one
of his
books sometime in the 1970s, he yelled
"blech!" and decided that
if you
wanted your documents to look right, you need to
do be able to it
yourself, and TeX rhymes with blech.