RE: why it is called a grove

[Jon Bosak <Jon.Bosak@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

[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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