On 9/15/2014 16:54, Paul Heinlein wrote: > On Mon, 15 Sep 2014, Valeri Galtsev wrote: > > 1. a throw-away line meant as a joke, I didn't take it as a joke so much as a comment that where he works, high-end hardware is available for the asking. SLC is the most expensive sort of SSD; if it's so readily available that he can joke about using them for paving tiles, he's pooh-poohing my observation that adding an SSD to a ZFS pool to accelerate it isn't free. Where he works, it effectively *is* free. Where *I* work, a freed-up second-hand 40 GB first-generation SSD is a welcome boon. > Who gets to say that USB is > an acceptable acronym while SLC is not? If you know, how does one become > that person? Prescriptivist lexicographers are popinjays that try to tell you what the legal words are. The descriptivists are the real lexicographers, because they merely try to figure out which words are actually being used in a widespread fashion and try to document the meaning(s) of those words. They understand how language actually works. SLC is perfectly cromulent to a descriptivist. It's in wide use in a large community, and a large fraction of that community agrees on its meaning. Keep in mind that there are only about 17,000 three-letter acronyms. Most will have conflicts. Yes, most. XQZ is yet unused according to http://www.acronymfinder.com/