On Wednesday, Apr 7, 2004, at 14:42 US/Pacific, Ake Hedman wrote:

> It's a total mystery to me how "William" becomes "Bill", its the same
> with Bill Gates etc. Can someone explain this to me, please...

Why, the same way that "Robert" becomes "Bob" and "Richard" becomes
"Dick", of course!  It's a mystery to me too...

(It's quite a separate mystery why one decides to use a formal name in
one place and a short name in another.  "William" seems to go
everywhere vaguely official, but no one calls me that, nor do I expect
them too.
"Chops" should be in quotes in the email header.  It's failure to
appear that way serves only as a demonstration of the tendency for
modern software to repeat bugs that were fixed 25 years ago in more
"mature" software.  (In fact, "Chops" is a high school nickname no one
has used much since I graduated from college.  It stayed in my mail
header precisely because of the uproar it caused in the email community
when I first put it there, about the time rfc822 was published...))

BillW

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