Actually, in English, "parenthesis" means the bit in between the brackets.
The various kinds of brackets (amongst other punctuation marks including, in most english texts, commas) *demarcate* parentheses. Wikipedia's "Parenthesis (rhetoric)" is, at time of writing, the correct British English definition, citing the OED: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenthesis_%28rhetoric%29 "An explanatory or qualifying word, clause, or sentence inserted into a passage with which it has not necessarily any grammatical connection, and from which it is usually marked off by round or square brackets, dashes, or commas" The use of round brackets to demarcate parentheses in america eventually somehow led to round brackets themselves being called parentheses in america, but that usage still makes little sense to many native speakers of British (or Hiberno-) English outside the computing field. It's like calling a quotation mark a "quote" instead of a "quotation mark". And lo, guess who does that too... Calling round brackets "parenthesis marks" would be acceptable but perhaps ambiguous in British English, probably needing further qualification like "double quotation mark", "single quotation mark". -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
