jack: (Default)
[personal profile] jack
Stupid questions, but where google and wikipedia fail me, my friends generally know.

1. "Xform" as an abbreviation of "transform". That's standard, isn't it? But where does that come from? I'm suddenly unsure. Is that just 'x' being 'an arbitrary operation'?

ETA: Thanks to three people who almost instantly pointed out that X works for 'trans', in the sense 'cross'.

2. "Havelock". I'm really only familiar with it as in "Vetinari", but I have the feeling it's a reference to something or other. There's a few other Havelocks on wikipedia, but nothing that made sense to me.

Date: 2006-03-17 04:15 pm (UTC)
simont: A picture of me in 2016 (Default)
From: [personal profile] simont
"x" is more widely used than that as an abbreviation for "trans", the other well known example being "xfer". I would have guessed that it's to do with the semantic similarity between "trans-" and "cross-".