At 08:41 PM 1/20/2000 -0700, Tim Atherton wrote: >Ah yes, but you can also use mat to mean not glossy... Of course you can, and lots of people do--but it confuses two similar words whose meanings are commonly different, so it's not particularly good practice. As it happens, I just loaded the new version of my unabridged dictionary from CDROM, so I checked. Sure enough, if you go far enough down in the list of definitions for each of the two words, you find the variant spelling of the other one--but the "preferred" meanings are clearly different, and the origins of the two words, while related, are not quite the same. But if it makes anybody happy to have to use only one word for two purposes, feel free--half the words in the English language already suffer from this, so one more isn't going to make much difference. :>) Gary Hunt <glh@srv.net> - Please turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for instructions.