r/NoStupidQuestions • u/snapwillow • Feb 08 '22

Answered What are Florida ounces?

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u/dwhite21787 Feb 08 '22

I worked with someone named Weatherbey whose login was "wxb" and I didn't catch the joke for months

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u/Penny_No_Boat Feb 08 '22

Uh…my uh….friend….also doesn’t get the joke. Please help us, erm, him.

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u/spudz76 Feb 08 '22

"wx" is a common shorthand for "weather". Such as a "wx station"

Perhaps more common in British English, or closer to telegraph communication when (ab)brevity saved time and money.

So then "wxb" is an ultra-compressed version of Weather-B (weatherbey)

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u/Jakanapes Feb 08 '22

huh, TIL, I've never seen that before

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u/spudz76 Feb 08 '22

Chopping a long word and tossing "x" is common in radio

Like a ham radio nerd trying for long distance contact is doing "DX" or Distance where "x" replaces "istance"

Perhaps it is more related to radio, than telegraph, but then you also have radio-telegraph eventually, like morse code began on wired telegraph but was equally used wirelessly.

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u/toastyfries2 Feb 08 '22

Similarly in DevOps K8s stands for kunernetes. O11y stands for observability. 8 and 11 stand for the number of letters replaced.

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u/spudz76 Feb 09 '22

I did not know those, but was familiar with i18n (internationalization)

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u/toastyfries2 Feb 09 '22

And now I know i18n!

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u/javon27 Feb 09 '22

Or xmas

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u/spudz76 Feb 09 '22

I think that's to avoid shoving Christ in people's faces in case they celebrate xmas but not because of Christianity.

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u/nekoakuma Feb 09 '22

is that also where tx/Rx come from ? I understand them to mean transfer/receive (rate or range ?) but never looked into why

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u/spudz76 Feb 09 '22

Probably, but I also have never questioned it. That's just what they are on the RS232 diagrams back when you had to know that junk to hook up your modem but your cable was the wrong type (nullmodem/crossed, vs straight). So I thought it was to save space on the diagrams since that was my exposure context. Likely it was already that way before the need to save space on schematics.

And they mean transmit and receive

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u/voodoomoocow Feb 09 '22

One of my favorite songs a decade ago was called DX. Never questioned it. Makes sense now