Stata or STATA: A Pedantic concern

[Attaullah Shah]

Hi all
I was reading the forum FAQs where the last in the FAQ is the way we should write Stata. The FAQ reads

The correct spelling is “Stata”, please, not “STATA”.

. I am confused by this statement because:

1. When I start the software, the welcome screen spells the names as "STATA"
2. The STATALIST derives its name from the software name and reads as "STATALIST" not "StataList"
3. The Stata personnel wears shirts that has text "STATA" not Stata", e.g. see Nick Cox profile picture.

Don't you think there should be uniformity in naming convention throughout?

[Andrew Lover]

Alas, the

  ___  ____  ____  ____  ____ (R)
 /__    /   ____/   /   ____/
___/   /   /___/   /   /___/   13.1

start screen is just a relic of old old display fonts....

[Maarten Buis]

I solve this by making a distinction between the logo (in essence a picture) and written text. You don't try to replicate a logo in written text; in written text you write words, and the normal rules for using capital letters apply. In a logo there is more "artistic" freedom.

Andrew's explanation for your point 1 sounds plausible to me.

As to your point 2, I usually write Statalist, sometimes statalist (if I am lazy), but never STATALIST nor StataList. As far as I know there is no logo for Statalist (and I don't think it needs one), so the normal rules for using capital letters in written (English) text applies.

As to your point 3, Nick is not a StataCorp employee. He probably received the shirt as a gift. You often get gifts like that by attending Stata User's Group meetings (http://www.stata.com/meeting/), and Nick has attended more than 1 (this is an understatement). Apart from that, what is displayed on the T-shirt is the logo, so my first comment applies.

[Nick Cox]

Andrew is right: The particular font used by StataCorp in its logo over most of its history is behind #1, #2 and #3. As I understand it, it's a big deal to change logos. Besides StataCorp is allowed to be a little sentimental about its origins. Further, if you were to read the logo literally, you might conclude that the spelling was STaTa or sTaTa, spellings that fortunately I have never seen before.

Set against that a key fact: the bulk of the documentation ever written one way or another is behind "Stata". Right at the beginning, the spelling "STATA" was used, but soon changed.

(They are good shirts, but as Maarten underlines I am not a StataCorp employee.)

[Rich Goldstein]

to help assess how important StataCorp thinks this is, let me ask them a question: many journals publish using STATA - does the company ever write to these journals asking them not to do that in the future? personally, I don't really mind how people refer to the product as long as they do refer to it :-)

[Maarten Buis]

I, as an author, feel bad about any spelling mistake that creeps into my published work, regardless of how StataCorp feels about it.

[Attaullah Shah]

Th active involvement of Nick in this group, being editor of the Stata Journal, and writer of several Stata programs, led me to believe he is an employee of Stata. Sorry for my confusion, Nick! As far as writing STATA or Stata is concerned, why would StataCorporation write its name or logo deliberately in an inconsistent manner on t-shirts and groups to spread confusion, while the corporation is so sensitive to capitalization in the first place?

[Nick Cox]

Attaullah:

To generalise what was said, no one in this thread (so far) is a StataCorp employee and strictly none of us can speak for the company.

But I think we can allay your concerns. StataCorp, like any other company, can have no interest in spreading confusion or being inconsistent about its product. If people really did take the logo literally, then they would have to conclude that the company is very confused at grade school level about when to use upper case and lower case letters. On the contrary, StataCorp is extremely careful about all such details: if you find a single typo in Stata's website, program or documentation, tell the company and you will be warmly and sincerely thanked.

The spelling "STATA" is common among new or inexperienced users, and it is possible that the logo doesn't help here. But (to agree in part with what Rich says) I doubt that the company cares enough about that small error to change the logo, which is much used and widely familiar. I think there is a case for quietly modifying the start-up message. Yet again, if the company did that, new users would mostly not notice and some old(er) users might feel nostalgic.

My own guess is that the bigger reason by far for the spelling "STATA" is that users are thinking by analogy with "SAS", "SPSS", etc. In those names the initials were initially an abbreviation, but the abbreviation has become a name. "Stata" was always a made-up name, so all caps is incorrect for such a name. In other words, "SAS" and "SPSS" were acronyms, but "Stata" never was.

[Rich Goldstein]

Maarten, the question, to me, is not how you feel about it but what you do about it; I'm certain that for some types of mistakes you would try and get a correction at least to the electronic version (e.g., if the word "not" was removed from a sentence, completely changing the meaning); do you write about the use of "STATA"? further, I find the use of "STATA" to be, at most, a minor irritant, about equal to the complaints about, esp. given the confusing signals, at best, from the company; I repeat that I don't really care, or even necessarily think it an error, to write "STATA" or "stata" as compared with "Stata"

[Richard Williams]

I will always maintain that people who use STATA are simply old fashioned, and old habits are hard to break. See this entry from the very first manual:

http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/sca/Stata1/elements.pdf

The entire manual is at

http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/sca/Stata1/

A few commands have been added since version 1, but it is interesting to see how much of the basic structure still remains. I think having a good foundation has helped Stata a lot. SPSS, on the other hand, has always struck me as having 50 different programs written by 50 different people who had 50 different ideas on what syntax should look like.

[Euslaner]

Attaullah:


My own guess is that the bigger reason by far for the spelling "STATA" is that users are thinking by analogy with "SAS", "SPSS", etc. In those names the initials were initially an abbreviation, but the abbreviation has become a name. "Stata" was always a made-up name, so all caps is incorrect for such a name. In other words, "SAS" and "SPSS" were acronyms, but "Stata" never was.

Nick is absolutely correct. I Googled SAS and it stands for Statistical Analysis System. Didn't need to do so for SPSS. I was around when it was introduced. Written by Norman Nie and a few other grad students (mostly in Political Science) at Stanford in the late 60s and early 70s. It stood for "Statistical Package for the Social Sciences," to distinguish it from the mainframe program most of us had used, BMD or BMDP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMDP), which was designed for the natural sciences (it was called "BioMed"). It had a very awkward command language as well as sometimes some very strange results: Its missing variable factor analysis program mostly produced correlation matrices with correlations that were strange at best (such as -6.53, yes that's right, greater than -1, but never as I can recall greater than +1).

[Richard Williams]

SPSS now officially stands for...SPSS. http://www.presidion.com/software/software-faqs.html I don't think SPSS wants people to think of Social Sciences when they think of the program, because it is so oriented toward the business market now. Sort of like how KFC now stands for KFC, probably because the company thinks Kentucky Fried Chicken stirs up negative images of unhealthy food.

If anyone cares, other examples of such name changes are at http://www.slate.com/articles/busine...abet_soup.html

[Attaullah Shah]

Sorry for sticking with my initial points. Thanks to Richard Williams for posting a link to Stata 1.0 reference manual. The manual clearly refers to the program as STATA, not Stata with several items concerned with the name, such as STATA Reference Manual, STATA program, STATA User's Guide, STATA's dictionary, and STATA commands, STATA fundamentals, I would like comments on this , see

http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/sca/Stata1/cover_toc.pdf

as this reference invalidate justification given by Andrew Lover and others

[Richard Williams]

Version 1 came out almost 30 years ago. Stata is free to change the way it spells its name if it wants to. Somewhere along the way I think they called it Double Turbo Stata, which, thank God, they quickly dropped.

[Nick Cox]

@Attaullah. Sorry, but we've already made the point (e.g. #4) that the original name "STATA" was quickly changed. That was also explained in http://www.stata-journal.com/sjpdf.h...iclenum=gn0017

@Richard. You mean BiTurbo. Don't forget Intercooled, which we still have. I don't think God intervened, either way.

(No wonder history is so difficult.)