[TUHS] Original print of V7 manual? / My own version of troff

[Diomidis Spinellis]

Knuth opens his TeXbook, explaining TeX's origin and pronunciation.

“English words like ‘technology’ stem from a Greek root beginning with 
the letters τεχ…; and this same Greek word means art as well as 
technology.  Hence the name TeX, which is an uppercase form of τεχ.”

He then indeed introduces blecchhh, but he doesn't connect it with the 
absence of quality.

“Insiders pronounce the χ of TeX as a Greek chi, not as an ‘x’ so that 
TeX rhymes with the word blecchhh.”

(I couldn't help noticing that in my 1989 edition of the book, ellipsis 
after τεχ appears to be set as three periods ‘...’ rather than a real 
ellipsis ‘…’.  The (modern) Greek words for art  and technology are 
τέχνη (techni) and τεχνολογία (technologia), respectively.

Diomidis

On 10-Jan-24 20:50, tuhs at cuzuco.com wrote:
 > No idea what COFF is, but in the early 1980s, two non-troff options on
 > the software side were -
 >
 > 1) TeX. From Donald Knuth, which means tau epsilon chi, pronounced tech
 >     not tex. The urban legend was upon seeing an inital copy of one 
of his
 >     books sometime in the 1970s, he yelled "blech!" and decided that 
if you
 >     wanted your documents to look right, you need to do be able to it
 >     yourself, and TeX rhymes with blech.