XPost: alt.usage.english   
   From: occam@nowhere.nix   
      
   On 12/11/2025 13:25, Richard Tobin wrote:   
   > In article <10f1i18$1am4s$1@dont-email.me>,   
   > Lawrence D'Oliveiro   wrote:   
   >   
   >>    The word performant has found a niche in the 21st century through   
   >>    adoption in computing contexts, but remains otherwise practically   
   >>    unknown in day-to-day communication, where more common   
   >>    alternatives (such as high-performance, efficient or effective)   
   >>    are typically adopted.   
   >>   
   >> Would you agree that it is very much a niche usage?   
   >   
   > I spend all my life in computing contexts, and have never heard anyone   
   > say the word.  But then I had never heard anyone say "informatics"   
   > until our department was renamed to that.  Both sound like the sort of   
   > made-up English found in EU technical documents.   
   >   
      
   The second of those ('informatics') /was/ invented by the EU, at the   
   same time as it invented 'telematics'.  I was in the Telematics   
   directorate when these terms were coined. The joke was that two   
   conjoined affixes (a prefix and a suffix) don't make much sense.   
      
   However the meaning was clear - information technology over a network.   
      
   Can I ask - when was your university department renamed to Informatics?   
   (My bet is on the 1990s, the start of the internet.)   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)