Endianness

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” — James D. Nicoll

The same could be said of byte ordering conventions. Different computer architectures have pursued different strategies for storing multi-byte values, leading to what can only be described as an unnecessarily theological dispute about the correct order of bytes.