There it festered, right in the middle of Branden's otherwise high literary style: "use cases". I've despaired over the term ever since it wormed its way into computer folks' vocabulary. How does a "use case" differ from a "use"? Or, what's the use of "use case"?
And while I'm despairing, "concatenate" rolls on, undeterred by Research's campaign for concision. We determinedly excised the word from the seventh edition. The man page header for cat(1) read "catenate and print". Posix added content on both ends, making "concatenate and print files". Gnu puffed it up further to "concatenate files and print on the standard output". It's not as if the seventh edition was storming the gates of English. According to the OED, "catenate" and "concatenate" are synonyms of long standing that entered the language almost simultaneously. Why pick the flabby one over its brisk--and more mnemonic--rival? Doug
