On Aug 15, 8:30 am, tony cooper
earthlink.net> wrote:> On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:56:30 -0700 (PDT), "jerry_fried...@
yahoo.com"
>
>
>
>
yahoo.com> wrote:>>On Aug 14, 10:47 pm, tony cooper
earthlink.net> wrote:>>> On Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:10:09 -0700 (PDT), "jerry_fried...@
yahoo.com"
>
>>>>> It should be remembered that the now-disappeared OP is not the writer
>>>>> of this paper. He is the husband of the MBA candidate. He may be
>>>>> arguing for the term most understandable by the layman and she may be
>>>>> following the literature.
>
>>>>That's not what he said in the original post, and we now know
>>>>differently.
>
>>> Oh, but he did. The original post was:
>
>>> "My wife is wiriting her MBA thesis on Internet marketing, and the
>>> like. We had an argument about which form of the word "drugstore" or
>>> "pharmacy" should be preferred. To my knowledge, a "drugstore" is more
>>> like AmE, and a "pharmacy" is probably preferred by the Brits. If the
>>> whole work is being prepared in the AmE style (phrasing, spelling,
>>> etc) the "drugstore" seems to be more appropriate, right?
>>> Thanks in advance for your kind help.
>
>>Maybe I was unclear. My "that" referred only to the last sentence you
>>wrote. All I see in what you quoted is American versus British, not
>>technical literature versus understandable to the layman.
>
> I don't understand. My last sentence is me conjecturing about the
> nature of the argument. How can that be in agreement/opposition to
> what he (the OP) said? It conjectures about what was not said.
I didn't say it was in agreement or in opposition. I said it wasn't
in what he wrote. I think we agree on that.
> Why are you now using "technical literature"? I thought you were
> taking the position that "literature" is the body of previous writing
> on the subject.
Technical as opposed to popular.
> This usage of "technical literature" seems to be a
> reference to the brochures that companies print to provide information
> on a product. The body of previous writing would be journal articles,
> books, papers, etc and not stuff printed by manufacturers. That would
> include technical data, but not be exclusively technical data.
> Frankly, I have trouble thinking of marketing schemes to be in the
> field of technical data at all with the exception of the presentation
> of some statistics.
Ricardo's wife's thesis wouldn't be a marketing scheme (I imagine); it
might be /about/ marketing schemes. I'm sure there are technical
terms in academic business research for various strategies, methods,
and so forth in marketing.
> This emphasizes how the word "literature" fails when referring to
> previous writing on business subjects.
I don't see why. I had no trouble understanding it.
> It may work for the MA candidate,
Or MS.
> but (to the best of my knowledge) it isn't used in the MBA
> world.
198,000 hits for "MBA thesis" and 58,000 for "MBA thesis literature",
of which the ones on the first page seem to use it the relevant
sense. That's a pretty substantial minority.
--
Jerry Friedman
