[Ads-l] "square brackets"

[Laurence Horn]

> On Mar 25, 2018, at 1:17 PM, Jim Parish <jparish at SIUE.EDU> wrote:
> 
> I've heard other mathematicians refer to "round brackets" (you know, the ones surrounding this aside) as well - usually having just mentioned the others.
> 
> But that's one of the things we mathematicians do: group and classify things. One genus ("bracket"), at least four species (throwing in "angle brackets").
> 
> Jim Parish

Ah, I’d forgotten those angle brackets, which proliferated in that same period, especially in work on phonology.  So square brackets would have needed to be so called even if the short-and-curlies were called braces.  But not being mathematicians, we went on calling parentheses parentheses and not round brackets.  Then there are those corner brackets (also called [left and right] corner quotes), not just the kind you get at Home Depot but the kind philosophers and some linguists (formal semanticists) use for certain quoted material in formulae.  So bushel baskets of brackets.

LH

> 
> 
> On 3/25/2018 12:12 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>> On Mar 25, 2018, at 1:04 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>>> 
>>> And "curly brackets"?
>>> 
>>> I grew up with "brackets" and "braces," not coming across the other version
>>> till 1972, when I was 35.
>>> 
>>> Youneverknow.
>> I think it was the late 1960s and early ‘70s when linguistic notation adopted both [square] brackets and curly brackets, a.k.a. braces, for different purposes.  If the latter (representing disjunctive ordering) had been called braces rather than curly brackets, I imagine the former would not have had to be designated by the retronym *square* brackets.
>> 
>> LH
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>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> 
> 
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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