Endabled....

[A. Vine]

GSCole wrote:
>
> Looking through a text file for a virus scanning program (VSHLOG.TXT),
> when I noticed that certain program options were listed as being either
> 'Disabled' or 'Endabled'.  An AltaVista search found 12 sites that used
> the word endabled.  [The log entries in the file date to 25 June 1999.]
>
> In what way does 'endabled' differ from 'enabled'?  Or, is the word
> merely a misspelling or a secondary spelling or a programming
> convention?
>

Looks like bad spellers/typists/comprehenders-of-the-word to me.
Certainly it is not a standard term in the industry.  Remember that in most
cases, the people actually writing the messages in software are the engineers
coding it.  Bear in mind that a large percentage of software engineers are not
native English speakers, and many have never formally studied it.  They think
they hear "endabled", and so they write it.  For messages embedded in program
code (a no-no* in my field), it is impossible to spell-check them, even if they
wanted to.

* another repeater for you, Larry.  I was trying to find another term with the
same sense and couldn't come up with one.

Andrea
--
Andrea Vine, avine at eng.sun.com
Sun-Netscape Alliance i18n architect
Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows.
-- Dr. Dave Farber (father of SNOBOL and one of the creators of Token Ring)