Questions for English Majors

[Peter L. Peres]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Jing Su wrote:

>> 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".

But the correct spelling in my opinion is Discos (or latinised 
Discus/Discum), and using ancient Greek characters. The Discobolus 
(sculpture of the (ancient olympic) athlete throwing the disc (sic)) is 
a good exemplification of the use imho. Was this what you had in mind 
with throwing the disc ? Anyway I think that you spell it any way your 
editor likes it, as long as it sounds like 'k' when they read it. In 
fact, the spell checkers have separate American and English dictionaries 
precisely for this purpose. And I am not an English Major. Not even a 
minor.

Peter
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