[Talk-GB] RFC-2 mechanical edit: UK shop names

[Matthijs Melissen]

On 4 November 2014 12:55, Philip Barnes <phil at trigpoint.me.uk> wrote:
> ALDI, LIDL, ASDA and SPAR are all abbreviations of their full names, in
> the same way as NATO, AIDS, BBC, OSM or GNU are.

Whether Spar is an abbreviation is doubtful. Spar is Dutch for spruce
(a species of tree), hence the logo. According to this article [1] (in
Dutch), the name originally only referred to the tree, and only later
a slogan was made up of which the initials corresponded to the letters
in 'De Spar'.

> I would prefer to keep things correct although usage in OSM does seem to
> have gone heavily away from this. Even the Germans can't decide with
> ALDI and LIDL.

I think everybody prefers to keep things correct, but I honestly don't
know what 'correct' in this context means. What is your idea of
correctness?

> In the late 70s, early 80s when ADSA arrived as the new kid on the
> block, everyone seemed to know it was short for Associated Dairies, but
> that has probably long since been forgotten.

According to Wikipedia, it actually stands for 'Asquith and Dairies'.
In any case, this abbreviation doesn't explain the capitals - given
the abbreviation, one would expect AsDa, not ASDA.

-- Matthijs