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#15339 01/11/01 07:42 PM
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If this is a YART, let me know, as it seems like you all would have been down this road before, but I wanted to air a peeve of mine.

I hear people saying and writing "acronym" when they mean "abbreviation" so often it drives me mad.

Is the view of the wordies present that an acronym is itself a word, composed of the initial letters of a series of words (e.g. scuba = self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), and that an abbreviation is imply the initial letters, lined up and pronounced individually (e.g. PC = personal computer, and is not pronounced 'pik')?

/rant

As a side not to this, English seems to limit itself in terms of acronym formation more than other languages I'm familiar with. Spanish is great for taking as many letters from the front of a word as it needs to make a pronounceable acronym, where English almost always seems to only take the first letter.

As an example, PROFEPA stands for Procuraduría Federal de Protección Ambiental (a Mexican government agency - Attorney General for Environmental Protection). The acronym uses three letters of the first word, two letters of the second, and one from each of the last two, in order to be pronounceable in Spanish.

Perhaps this stems from the fact the English has so many different pronunciations of letters, based on what they're next to, combined with, etc., that English-speakers can always just take a go at pronouncing it, whereas Spanish has basically one sound for each letter. Dunno.


#15340 01/11/01 08:10 PM
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Hyla asks: Is the view of the wordies present that an acronym is itself a word?

Or at least something pronounceable. Some were abbreviations first and only later became words. Scuba is a good example as is radar, (RAdio Detection And Ranging) and laser. The OED supplement even recognizes the back-formed verb lase. In the area of local NYS government SEQR stands for State Environmental Quality Review and is pronounced [seeker]. The ones I like are acronyms in which the first word of the expansion is the same as the abbreviation. NEAR stands for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous.


#15341 01/11/01 08:54 PM
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Those of us in the IT industry daily have to pick out what an acronym stands for from the context. The feasible limits (particularly of the TLA - three-letter acronym) have been reached and we're now recycling them, often before the first use has been abandoned. Sometimes these multiple definitions fall within the same area of IT and can be used adjacently.

It was suggested once that to combat this IT people need to adopt a tonal variation of English where you pitch your vocalisation of a TLA at a particular tone for each specific meaning.



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#15342 01/11/01 08:59 PM
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speaking to Hyla's point, it would seem that TLA would be an abbreviation, rather than being self-referential (unless you have some clever pronunciation for TLA).


#15343 01/11/01 09:02 PM
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Thank you, Hyla, for picking up on something that has mildly irritated me for years.
Strictly speaking, I think and acronym should be a set of initials that spell a word already in the lexicon, but I am quite prepared to accept the term for pronounceable words - especailly if they then become accepted as words in their own right.

But a list of initials is a list of initials - not even really an abbreviation.
/rant


#15344 01/11/01 09:16 PM
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In reply to:

But a list of initials is a list of initials - not even really an abbreviation.


What about morphing lists of initials? I'm tthinking of "words" like "scuzzie" for SCSI. Then there's wysiwyg, which sounds like it could be an enquiry into a man's political affiliation.



#15345 01/11/01 09:25 PM
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I think you'd do better to save yourselves the angst and get used the misuse - it's entrenched. Move onto a bigger battle.


#15346 01/11/01 10:10 PM
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Strictly speaking, I think and acronym should be a set of initials that spell a word already in the lexicon, but I am quite prepared to accept the term for pronounceable words

At the risk of picking nits, I'd say there are some pretty well-established acronyms (scuba, radar, laser) that have become words in the lexicon, but that would not have qualified as acronyms under your description. I guess I want to see acronym used properly because I really like the creation of a word in such a way, and its meaning is lessened when it applies to any abbreviation.


#15347 01/11/01 10:56 PM
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I think you'd do better to save yourselves the angst and get used the misuse - it's entrenched. Move onto a bigger battle.

I do hate painful truths like this. Aren't most of the battles that we discuss on this board fairly small individually, but add up to a larger war against garbage usage? (A bit dramatic a metaphor )

On the side note I raised in my original post, about how different languages form acronyms - any experience people have in other languages with this?


#15348 01/12/01 12:32 AM
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>how different languages form acronyms - any experience people have in other languages with this?

Hello again Hyla,

More as an aside than anything else, I seem to recall my French teacher explaining that the model designations of Citroens of the era (at least a couple of them, anyway - I don't know if the company continued the practice, or even if the company continued!) formed words when the letters were pronounced (in French of course!):

ID = idée [ee-day] = idea
DS = déesse [day-ess]= goddess

I have heard similar stories about car models in English, eg SX is meant to sound like "sex" (the word, not the activity!), although I would have thought it's Essex!

But I guess these don't qualify as acronyms, since the ploy relies on pronouncing the individual letters not the "word" thus formed, and they aren't formed from the initial letters of words, as far as I know.



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