[Info-vax] Long uptime cut short by Hurricane Sandy

[AEF]

On Feb 8, 9:34 am, koeh... at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob
Koehler) wrote:
> In article <00ACE8D1.2C449... at SendSpamHere.ORG>,   VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG writes:
>
>
>
> > Oh no!  I'm having a bad flashback to the VAXes or VAXen debate.
>
>    IIRC, VAXes suck, and VAXen run VMS, some variant of BSD, or VAXeln.
>
>    8-)

Well, VAXen reminds me of Vixen, which reminds me of reindeer, which
reminds me of fauna. I don't see what any of these have to do with VAX
systems; therefore, I prefer VAXes or VAX systems. I think the docs
only use the latter term.

You wouldn't say or write foxen, or boxen, or faxen, waxen, taxen,
axen, saxen, climaxen, syntaxen, thoraxen, zaxen, addaxen, thoraxen,
and possibly more as plural nouns.

So that leaves you with oxen. And what do oxen have to do with VAXes?
Ox "ends" with "ox", not "ax". VAX ends in "AX", not "OX". All the *ax
words have "es" added to make them plural, not "en". And even some *ox
words have "es" added to make them plural! Actually, I don't think
there _are_ any plural words that end in "xen" except for oxen. Recall
that "ax".NE."ox".

So VAXes it is. VAXen is illogical. The term has no parallel in the
English language.

AEF