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Historic

Why it is called a grove?


Date:      Wed, 21 Jul 1999 22:35:49 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Jon Bosak <Jon.Bosak@eng.sun.com>
To:        dssslist@mulberrytech.com
Subject:   RE: why it is called a grove

[James Mason:]

| "Grove" is one of those historical things that just exists in the
| terminology. You just have to live with it. It was hatched in the
| middle of a discussion in a standards meeting (July 1985, Trinity
| College Dublin, if I remember rightly), as a way of discussing a
| collection of trees. The formal definition ("Graph Representation Of
| property ValuEs",
| http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/wg8/docs/n1920/html/clause-3.html , Clause
| 3.36) is something thought up afterwards, like the many explanations
| of CALS.

Yes, it was at the meeting at TCD in July of 1995, and the expansion of the "acronym" came later.

Charles Goldfarb came up with the name "grove" after a couple of us threatened to lie down in the road over his previous attempt, OOSE (pronounced "ooze"). The night before this got resolved, a few of us had come up with the Irish word "doire," meaning 'oak wood' (the origin, I learned later, of the "derry" that is seen in so many place names), but we had to admit in the cold light of day that it was going to be hard to get people to use the plural correctly. When Charles thought of "grove," I grabbed the OED (a copy of which happened to be located in a library annex near where we were meeting) and found this definition:

A small wood; a group of trees affording shade or forming avenues or walks, occurring naturally or planted for a special purpose. Groves were commonly planted by heathen peoples in honour of deities to serve as places of worship or for the reception of images.

I think it was the part about "heathen peoples" that convinced us.

Jon


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