Re: French and &

[Fionnuala Broughan <FB -at- POINTDUBLIN -dot- CCMAIL -dot- COMPUSERVE -dot- COM>]

     Greetings from the western edge of Europe.

     I've been lurking here for a while. Interesting list!

     While I have lots of comments on tech writers vs engineers, innate vs
     learned skills and the like, some of those topics have been done to
     death, and I imagine we're all glad to see the back of them. Here are
     one or two comments on recent topics


     Vincent replied to Melissa that "technical writer" in French is:

     ***redacteur technique***

     However, I think Melissa should probably call herself:

     ***une redactrice technique***.

     Or is *redacteur* like *geologue* (geologist; I used to be one!) and
     remains in its masculine form, regardless of the person it's
     describing?

     While all you North Americans debate about what to call the # sign and
     when to include it with numbers, it might be interesting to remember
     that there are a lot of places in the world where # does NOT mean
     number. For example, in Ireland and the UK, we generally use No.
     (which I think comes from the French *numero*). What do you use in Oz,
     all you writers down there?

     I LOVE the one-word oxymoron discussion, my favourite is definitely
     "monosyllabic"

     That's it.

     Fionnuala Broughan

     fb -at- pointdublin -dot- ccmail -dot- compuserve -dot- com