Questions for English Majors

[Jing Su]

> My understanding of it is that disc is british and disk is american.  I
> personally use disc for spiral track media (usually optical) and disk
> for circular track media (usually magnetic).  Not really sure why I
> started doing that, other than the official name for CD is Compact Disc
> and everything else always seems to refer to floppy disk and hard disk
> (I guess IBM may have had something to do with that).

I personally think (yeah, I know my personal opinion means nothing in
the face of proper English) that "disk" should be used as the regular
default unless the media being handled is discus shaped.  Hard-drives
are enclosed in nice boxes, so they're "disk".  CDs and DVDs can be
thrown, and to a degree fly well, so they get "disc".
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