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old hand
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old hand
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> It sounds a lot like "Engio." Some abbreviations just sort of naturally lend themselves to this kind of thing. They just sound like words.
Oh, now I get the 'acronym' thing - it sounds like a word when you say the letters individually. Okay, far be it from me (but that's just not an acronym;-)
[running for cover]
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Perhaps at some time in the not so distant past everyone in the known universe agreed that "acronym" referred only to collections of letters taken from the first letters of the individual words in a phrase, those letters forming a pronounceable word that was pronounced as that word, but those days are gone.
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veteran
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veteran
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I had a friend in college named "Nguyen," pronounced nwin. Perhaps NGO should be pronounced propily as nwo, and engio is just a regional variation.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Quote:
Ahem, I said: "It's used a lot in the news." Must be my Californy accent. I did see your comment, thank you; but I was afraid that if I acknowledged it, everyone would think my question (which was NOT 'what does NGO stand for') had been answered, and the thread would then shut down.
Guess I've not been watching the right news shows. Thanks, all.
I've known the term since the early 1980s, but I was living in Brazil then when NGOs (or ONGs, as they were acronymized [yes!] in Portuguese) were (and still are, I guess) well-known and well-received.
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old hand
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old hand
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> but those days are gone.
Does that mean we can invent a new word for its former meaning?
[shedding tears]
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old hand
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old hand
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but those days are gone. - Does that mean we can invent a new word for its former meaning?
I think he means that the days when everyone agreed are gone. I agree  .
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addict
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addict
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Quote:
Before reading the other posts, all I could come up with was humming hmm hmm N G O hmm hmm N G O... Now I find the song is about "business-oriented international non-governmental organizations". No wonder they gave the poor dog an acronym.
As usually happens, after saying I've never heard of it, I heard a BBC announcer use it while translating for a Czech woman on National Public Radio.
I decided to do a search on my local newspaper site (Dallas Morning News). I found 5 uses of NGO in the last month - 1 apropos, 1 about a Russian law relating to oil pipelines, 2 different Vietnamese names and one I couldn't actually find in the text - might have been in the name of an image file or something. In that same time period, there are 1,770 references to FBI and 709 references to CIA. (I didn't check them all to see if any were to the Culinary Institute of America.)
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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Thanks, Myr.
Faldage and all, I apologize for calling NGO an acronym; but what should I have put?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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what should I have put?
I think that FBI, NGO, and the like are called initialisms.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Quote:
what should I have put?
I think that FBI, NGO, and the like are called initialisms.
Or either acronyms, depending in whether you've accepted the prevalent meaning shift in the term.
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