Why is is called "E-Prime"?

[David McFarlane]

Curious minds want to know.  So, I went ahead and posted this 
question to PST Web Support (as I keep saying, they really do 
generously take any and all questions there, and they did reply 
within 2 days).  Laura McCarthy replied, "E-Prime refers to the 
Experimenter's Prime (best) development studio for the implementation 
of computerized behavioral research such as reaction time, detection, 
and learning type paradigms."  She does not have a source citation 
for this, and neither do I -- I might have seen this explained in one 
of the early published papers introducing E-Prime, or in some of the 
early documentation for the beta versions that we started using back 
in 1998 or 1999. I might go back sometime and look further, but this 
should do for now.

-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder


At 5/23/2011 02:20 PM Monday, in the thread "E-DataAid crashing" 
(http://groups.google.com/group/e-prime/browse_thread/thread/2351146132d184ea 
),  David McFarlane wrote:
>At 5/23/2011 11:55 AM Monday, Michiel Spape wrote:
>>As a side note, does anyone else think e-Prime should, in this 
>>i-Age, change the name? I'm personally of the opinion that Me-Prime 
>>sounds better (although perhaps a bit too late, as YouTube, MySpace 
>>and YouGov have all lost that glossiness... Gee-Prime and /i/-Prime 
>>will probably end up to be rather costly).
>
>As I recall, the name "E-Prime" was meant to evoke 
>"Experiment-Prime", i.e., "Experiment'", somewhat in the fashion of 
>Isaac Newton's notation for derivatives; and so "E-Prime" was meant 
>to evoke a system that advances experiments to the next level.  But 
>I don't know where I read that, and I can't find a citation now.
>
>I was never fond of this affectation (just like I was never fond of 
>PST calling experiment programs "paradigms", or calling VBA/E-Basic 
>source code "script", etc.).  But I understand the name, and in that 
>sense I suppose E-Prime makes more sense than <any other letter>-Prime.
>
>Just my US$.02,
>-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "E-Prime" group.
To post to this group, send email to e-prime at googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to e-prime+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/e-prime?hl=en.