Return or Enter for US users?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Michelle Deeprose wondered <<Coming out of lurkdom to ask a quick question
of the Americans on the list, do you use the term Enter or Return?>>

I'm writing from Canada, one of those small U.S. colonies most people have
never heard of. But we pretty much follow U.S. trends on these things, so I
thought I'd contribute too... <g>

When I started in computing more than 20 years ago, "Return" was still a
common usage because people were still making the transition from
typewriters to keyboards, and using a familiar word supposedly eased this
transition. Nowadays, the trend is strongly towards saying "Enter" because
that's the way the key is most often labeled on the keyboard--both in the
main keyboard and in the numeric keypad--and you should always refer to the
actual keyboard layout. Don't have my Mac handy to check whether that's true
outside the Wintel world, and I've been touch-typing too long to remember
what the key actually says.

Interestingly, even keyboards that aren't equipped with a key labeled
"Return" generally have the little "down, then to the left" arrow under
Enter (on the alphabet part of the keyboard) as a reminder of the
typewriter's "carriage return". I wonder if this will puzzle my
grandchildren to the same extent that rotary telephone dials are likely to
do. ("Why do we 'dial' someone's number, gramps? And what's a dial anyway?"
<G>)

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 
"User's advocate" online monthly at
www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html
"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."--Goethe


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