While discussing ISO with my wife this morning, I had a few thoughts about qualifications.

I think several aspects of that statement require explanation.

ISO

ISO is the International Organization for Standardization, or L'Organisation internationale de normalisation, or Международная организация по стандартизации, depending on which official language you use (English, French, or Russian). It was founded in 1947 to define standards.

Photography enthusiasts know about the organization because of ISO 6, the film sensitivity standards that it developed from earlier ASA and DIN standards (I apologize, but I couldn't resist the pun). Anyone who has burned a CD knows about the organization because of ISO 9660, the volume and file structure standard issued for compact disc format. Our discussion today revolved around ISO 8601, the date and time format.

We were sharing memes with each other and she sent me the comprehensive world map of all countries that use the mm/dd/yyyy format:

This is a joke we share because Jule Ann grew up in Canada, which uses a reasonable date format, and I put year first because I spend a lot of time sorting various log messages on a computer.

I decided to pretend to yell at the Americans for using mm/dd/yyyy and wanted to mentioned the ISO date and time standard, but I had to look up the number. In the process, I read some of the Wikipedia entry for ISO and learned that ISO is not an abbreviation of International Standards Organization. From the About Us page on iso.org:

Because “International Organization for Standardization” would have different acronyms in different languages (IOS in English, OIN in French for Organisation internationale de normalisation), our founders decided to give it the short form ISO. ISO is derived from the Greek “isos”, meaning equal. Whatever the country, whatever the language, we are always ISO.

I shared the factoid with my wife, who pointed out that ISO is also not an abbreviation of International Stand-Ords, which is surprising, but logical.

I wondered why English, French, and Russian are the three official languages. In 1947, anyone thinking about international standards would have to account for the recent Allied victory in the Second World War, since that was likely the largest international coordination effort ever. English and Russian would have been obvious language choices because of the "big three" Allies (the USA, Britain, and the Soviet Union). I decided that French was chosen because France was the "most hurt by the war." That statement is only true from a white, European, western culture point of view, so I phrased it as follows:

I feel like all of those international organizations that started after WWII use French because they were the non-communist white Europeans who were most hurt by the war.

Qualifications

I used qualifications to the phrase "most hurt by the war." Jule Ann and I have talked before about qualified statements because I graduated from Germantown Academy, which calls itself "the oldest, non-sectarian, continuously run, independent day school in America." She teased me when I mentioned the fact, because there are so many qualifications. If you add enough qualifications, you can make anything supreme.

The second of the titular "thoughts about qualifications" was one that I hadn't previously considered. Adding qualifications excludes or erases. To truly say that the French were "most hurt by the war," you have to exclude a lot of people. Many people groups were devastated by the war, including Russian, Chinese, Northern African, Middle Eastern, Jewish, Romani, Polish, Pacific Islander, and others. It's not a particularly surprising realization (certainly nothing like ISO is not an abbreviation of International Stand-Ords), but I don't think I could have articulated it before today.