Actually, neither "angstrom" nor "nanometer" are in common use. Hardly
anyone talks or writes about things small enough to require such terms, except
scientists and some engineers.
The
term "angstrom" will likely hang around at least for another generation, in the
technical community.
But
even a rare word, in an English-language encyclopedia, should be rendered
according to the naming convention: when used as a unit of measure, the accents
are dropped. When referring to the 19th-century Swedish physicist, the accents
are retained. Fair enough?
Ed
Poor
At 01:31 PM 11/20/02 -0800,
Bridget wrote:
Angstrom, being a word not in
common usage at all, should be written Ångström, in honor of Anders Jonas
Ångström, who was smarter than many of you and thus knew how to spell
his own name.
Angstrom is part of my everyday vocabulary, and
that of many other people.
As a personal name, it takes a diacritic not
available in English; as a term of
art in the metric system, it does not.
Being so smart, you know this already.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr@redbird.org