
404 Part III n Information Quality Applied to Core Business Value Circles
CRITICAL DIACRITICAL MARKS MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE
1. The Spanish word “año” (with a tilde) means “year,” but the same spelling
without the diacritical mark, “ano,” means “anus.” Can you imagine how it
would feel to receive a birthday invitation for a twelve-year-old’s birthday
to celebrate his or her twelve anuses!!!
2. In Hungarian, the word To
”
ke (double acute accent) means capital (as in
money), but the word Töke (with an umlaut) means testicles.
3. Norwegian: “Se og Hør” means “Look and Listen,” but “Se og Hor” means
“Look and Adultery.”
Always use local-language forms
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, particularly of place names. Some compa-
nies still think it normal to store place names such as Köln as Cologne and
Milano as Milan, and go to a great deal of expense to do this. There is no
reason to do this and it guarantees you will annoy your Customers.
Use full stops
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when writing Acronyms or Abbreviations such as B.B.C.
Operationally, this allows your systems to see that this is an abbreviation
and, for example, to leave the data in uppercase. No system can recognize
that BBC is an abbreviation and not a word. If you wish to present such
data without full stops, you can easily program it this way.
Use
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numeric fields to store only data required in calculations. Storing
telephone number and postal code data in numeric fields ...