Linux and Lucy

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

Hey everybody. It’s me Chris, your favourite questioner of pronunciations. Today, I’d like to question something that I should have questioned a long time ago. In fact, I think I did, but as I don’t have it in writing I can’t really direct you to my previous questioning.

When Linux was first a thing, I was pronouncing it with a long I, as in “Line Ux.” It made sense to me. It was an open source operating system, meaning that others could go through and edit lines of code to help improve it. Also, I so much wanted to write something about it and call it “Linux and Lucy” after the brother and sister in Peanuts.

I was a little resistant when people started explaining to me that it was Linux, which was pronounced more like Annie Lennox than Benjamin Linus. The problem was that if everybody else was convinced that it was pronounced like “Lennox” and bent like Beckham… sorry, that didn’t make any sense… then no one was going to get my title. They would be like, “Lennox and Lucy?”

The next step of this is that there is a rumour that the creator of Linux joked that he names his projects after himself, explaining why he call his more recent project Git. It’s a self-deprecation joke suggesting that he’s a git. That’s not the important part though.

The important part is his name is Linus Torvalds. Linus! Meaning that I wasn’t far off. I’m still a little bit wrong, but not far off. These jif pronouncing Lennox pronouncing Bjork, it rhymes with jerk, jerks are completely wrong though.

What I got wrong was that it has nothing to do with lines of code. And the long I pronunciation of Linus is more of an Americanization of the name, which he pronounces as Lee-noos. This means that Linux’s creator pronounces the software’s name as Lee-nooks.

I guess at the end of the day, I really don’t care how people pronounce it. I’m just glad I finally got to use the damn title.

Chris McGit-ny is a blogger who is still tired of all these misprouncinations…