« FLAT lined? | Main | Controlled, altered, deleted »
A short history of language
Thanks, through gritted teeth, to all of you who emailed us to refine, by which we mean to disagree with, our definition of abbreviations and acronyms.
To summarise your response: words such as CBT (compulsory basic training) are shortened phrases, so they are most certainly abbreviated and are abbreviations. An acronym is a word that is made out of the initial letters of a phrase, so CBT fails, but Nato is indeed an acronym.
Which leaves initialisms: some of you decide that it is a stricter form of the acronym, made from the first letters of all the words in the phrase – not missing out ‘the’ or ‘of’ if it spoils the word. Some of you say it is an bbreviation that is not an acronym – CBT again.
And some of you say it is both. Use this information wisely to upbraid your colleagues for their foolish lack of rigour, but please stop emailing us about it.
I know you don't want more correspondence on this, but your explanation is still wrong. An ABBREVIATION is a shortening. It can be of a single word, for example "esp." for "especially" or of a phrase, for example "WC" for "water closet". An ABBREVIATION is an ACRONYM if (and only if) it is itself a recognisable word. Hence the abbreviation of Computer Resource Allocation Project (CRAP) is also an acronym - and possibly fair comment. If the abbreviation does NOT form a recognisable word, it is an INITIALISM. Hence, NATO is an initialism and not an acronym.
Webster's Dictionary agrees with all of the above, but states that an ACRONYM does not have to be a PRE-EXISTING word. This ignores the nuance of meaning between INITIALISM and ACRONYM. But Webster's is written by Americans, who wouldn't know a nuance unless George Bush invaded it.
Furthermore, an acronym so familiar that no one remembers what it stands for is called an ANACRONYM - for example, few people know that COBOL stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language. (Alright, NATO could be an anacronym).
An acronym in which one of the letters stands for the actual word abbreviated therein is called a RECURSIVE ACRONYM. For example, VISA is said to stand for VISA International Service Association.
An acronym in which the short form was the original and the phrase made up later is called a BACKRONYM. For example, SOS was originally chosen as a distress signal because it was easy to send in Morse code. "Explanations", including Save Our Ship and Save our Souls, came later.
An acronym whose letters spell a word meaningful in the context of the term it stands for is called an APRONYM. For example, BASIC, which stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, is a very simple, i.e. basic, programming language.
Posted by :John | February 4, 2007 12:23 PM