Re: The term "fabber"

From: Marshall Burns (Marshall@Ennex.com)
Date: Wed Sep 08 1999 - 17:31:00 EEST


Excerpts from a private e-mail received:

>I appreciate your efforts to promote the use of proper
>nomenclature within the rapid prototyping community.
>I share your position that new terms need to be created
>...
>However, I find the term "fabber" a very strange word. I
>...
>Therefore I believe we should continue to seek new words
>to better describe this new class of machines and processes.

    I agree. I am not committed to the term "fabber" and would give it up
for something better, less strange sounding. I don't want to use "3-D
printer" because I think this stuff deserves distinct treatment from
printers and because it will create confusion when you want to leave off the
"3-D" prefix. There was a movement sometime back to call these machines
"holoformers," but I submit that that is no less strange than "fabbers."
Sometimes a word just sounds strange until people become accustomed to using
it. In the meantime, I'm open to alternative suggestions.

    By the way, the word does begin to feel less strange when you get
comfortable with using the verb, "to fab," as in, "Let's fab a model of that
new design." From "fab" one gets easily to "fabbing" and then "fabber."

Best regards,
Marshall Burns

Marshall@Ennex.com
Ennex Corporation, Los Angeles, USA, (310) 824-8700
www.Ennex.com

For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:52:38 EEST