Originally Posted by
SkyDog75
Common parlance is often inaccurate to some degree, but for better or worse, it's the lingua franca. If someone's talking about an "ISO headset" without further clarification, I expect that they're referring to 30.2/26.4/24tpi, whether or not there's an official ISO spec. It might irk me personally that we're misspeaking, but hey, the listener knows what the speaker's talking about, and that's the ultimate goal of communication.
I'm always trying to learn about inaccuracies and correct them when I can -- and I appreciate your input for that -- but it's important to balance that with an awareness of common nomenclature. If we're too pedantic, we'll miss out on a lot of communication.
I agree with that to a great extent. But it's only the
lingua franca in the echo chamber that the internet has become, and unfortunately largely because of Sheldon Brown's publishing of inaccurate information. Credit where it's due: the vast majority of what he published is accurate and useful. God bless him for for that. But his inaccuracies persist. IMO his inaccuracy and oversimplification of the headset "standard" situation seems to me to have created far more confusion than clarity. Better IMO to acknowledge the complexity and deal with it than to try to stuff the past headset world into two neat boxes.
Before sheldonbrowndotcom, literally nobody talked about ISO headsets because
there was no such thing. Technically, that's still true. JIS, sure, that means something. But otherwise there were British and Italian and American and what have you. And we dealt with the dimensions and threads as they existed. In the current age of S.H.I.S. I am frankly baffled at the seeming desire to reduce the past's lack of standardization to a overly simple but inaccurate dichotomy. Especially when talking about C&V bikes.