Counter: the reason “iff” works is because people who don’t get it can still read the sentence and not worry they missed something key. If you use “ifeff” then massive audiences will infer that the sentence is unreadable.
I’d argue that people who are not familiar with “iff” are usually unfamiliar with its full version “if and only if” as well and, unaware of the need for such distinction, tend to treat regular “if” as bidirectional. These two mistakes will cancel each other out and they won’t miss said something key.
Agreed. I think this basically makes concerns about “iff” being mistaken for “if” irrelevant and trying to make a better shorthand for “if and only if” is a distraction with insufficient impact for most anyone to trouble themselves with.
What about “if(f)”? Pronounced ‘ifeff’, but spelled ‘if(f)’ so it’s both:
Easy to tell that this is a variant of ‘if’, and if you round things off to colloquial ‘if’ then you’ll at least sort of get what’s being said (context probably helps).
Easy to tell that it’s not just ‘if’ or a typo for ‘if’.
I wouldn’t expect if(f) to be linguistically successful; it’s weird in a not-quite-a-word way that means it can’t ever become a regular vocabulary item.
Alt: I think ifif makes much more sense than ifeff. It’s super unclear where the ‘e’ comes from or why there’s two ’f’s, but “if and only if” is “ifif” if you take the start and the end.
Counter: the reason “iff” works is because people who don’t get it can still read the sentence and not worry they missed something key. If you use “ifeff” then massive audiences will infer that the sentence is unreadable.
But they did miss something key!
I’d argue that people who are not familiar with “iff” are usually unfamiliar with its full version “if and only if” as well and, unaware of the need for such distinction, tend to treat regular “if” as bidirectional. These two mistakes will cancel each other out and they won’t miss said something key.
Agreed. I think this basically makes concerns about “iff” being mistaken for “if” irrelevant and trying to make a better shorthand for “if and only if” is a distraction with insufficient impact for most anyone to trouble themselves with.
What about “if(f)”? Pronounced ‘ifeff’, but spelled ‘if(f)’ so it’s both:
Easy to tell that this is a variant of ‘if’, and if you round things off to colloquial ‘if’ then you’ll at least sort of get what’s being said (context probably helps).
Easy to tell that it’s not just ‘if’ or a typo for ‘if’.
I wouldn’t expect if(f) to be linguistically successful; it’s weird in a not-quite-a-word way that means it can’t ever become a regular vocabulary item.
Alt: I think ifif makes much more sense than ifeff. It’s super unclear where the ‘e’ comes from or why there’s two ’f’s, but “if and only if” is “ifif” if you take the start and the end.
How about if’f or if-f? Both are easier to type than if(f), but still look less like an error than iff.
The whole “add punctuation” strategy still ruins the word for Scrabble, though. :(
Edit: … and I see now that gilch had the exact same idea right below.