Abbreviatory oddities
Orphan
abbreviations (including initialisms and acronyms and some things
that are a little bit of both) are notable in that they look like
abbreviations -- they are spelled with upper-case letters (sometimes
mixed with other symbols and some lower-case letters) -- and they
originated as abbreviations, but it's now claimed that they no longer
stand for some other expression.
This is a different phenomenon from a much more common case, in which
orthographic expressions that were originally abbreviations, of one
type or another, have been naturalized as, assimilated as, ordinary
words (fully lower-cased, if common nouns, or with initial caps only,
if proper nouns), their abbreviatory ancestry now lost to all but
experts and etymologists:
radar,
scuba,
modem, and the programming language
names
Lisp and
Algol, for instance.
In still another set of cases, abbreviatory "readings" are assigned to
words that in fact have no such actual history (in acronymic
etymythologies like "To Insure Promptness" for
tip) or to words that have such a
history, but not this one ("Drugs Are Really Evil" for
DARE, "Drug Abuse Resistance
Education"); these are various types of
backronyms. The novel
readings may be simple errors, arising from people's desire to find
meaning wherever they can, or deliberate inventions -- for
institutional purposes ("Trans World Airline" for
TWA, replacing the original
"Transcontinental and Western Air"), as bits of language play ("Bill's
Attempt to Seize Industry Control" used jocularly for
BASIC, "Beginners' All-purpose
Symbolic Instruction Code"), or as attempts to achieve a memorable name
by coercing an abbreviation:
BASIC,
for example, and the spectacular short title
USA PATRIOT Act (of 10/24/01),
whose name is presented as an abbreviation for "Uniting and
Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to
Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism". In coerced abbreviations, as
in the replacements, there's a sense in which the abbreviation comes
first, with the "reading" jiggled to fit it.
People have been writing me tons of messages about all three of these
phenomena, as well as about garden-variety, unproblematic
abbreviations. This is fascinating stuff, though a bit
overwhelming. Let me stress here that my purpose is only to
distinguish between some phenomena, illustrate them, and find suitable
terminology for talking about them. I am
NOT
proposing to create an encyclopedia of orphans, or (goodness knows) any
of the other types.
That said, the mail contained several especially interesting
observations.
From R. Michael Medley, the tale of the orphan acronym
NAFSA (pronounced in two
syllables), originally abbreviating the "National Association of
Foreign Student Advisors". At some point the members of the
organization switched from referring to the people they advised as
"foreign students" to referring to them as "international students",
and
NAFSA ceased to be
treated as an abbreviation for anything, but continued to serve as the
name of the organization. Rather than just changing its name to
something more appropriate -- "Association of International Educators"
was what got chosen -- the organization went instead for the
double-barreled "NAFSA: Association of International Educators" (see
the website). In effect, the
orphan acronym
NAFSA got
adopted by the Association of International Educators. As far as
I can tell, the adoptive parent never goes by the initialism
AIE (or an acronymic version
pronounced like the exclamation "aiee!"; note that there's a slew of
AIEs around the world, from the
American Institute of Engineers to the Australian Institute of Energy,
but I suspect they're all treated as initialisms).
Meanwhile, Vance Maverick points out that the websites for both
SRI and
Texas A&M
acknowledge the initialistic origins of their names, though they're
clear about the current names being just as above. SGI hasn't
gone all the way (yet), since its
company fact sheet refers to "SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc." (though the rest of the website uses "SGI" throughout).
From Victor Steinbok, a cornucopia of orphan-related references,
including the case of
Crisco,
which according to its
Wikipedia entry,
derived "from the initial sounds of the expression 'crystallized
cottonseed oil'". This is yet a new case, in which some original
expression motivates a brief name, but does not actually have currency
as a name in its own right. Think of it as a muse rather than a
parent.
Steinbok also asks about
Cisco
Systems: is
Cisco an
acronym? No; as the
Wikipedia site
explains, it's a clipping of
San Francisco.
Finally, the world of names for programming languages, text editors,
operating systems, and the like is an abbreviatory morass, with older
all-caps names (FORTRAN, BASIC, LISP, COBOL, ALGOL, EMACS, UNIX)
alternating in common usage with initial-caps names (Fortran, Basic,
Lisp, Cobol, Algol, Emacs, Unix). In some cases, the all-caps
names are now the trademarked versions (UNIX), and the official
websites use only these versions. In other cases, the
initial-caps names are standard (Emacs). In still other cases,
the all-caps versions are almost universal (GNU, which, entertainingly,
stands for "Gnu's Not Unix"). Few people know the origins of
these names, however, or even recognize them as (opaque) abbreviations;
probably, many assume that the upper-casing is just a commercial bid
for attention.
(Thanks to Cameron Majidi on
modem
and Adam Roberts on
TWA.
The now-standard source for "etymythology" is Larry Horn's 2004 article
"
Spitten image: Etymythology
and fluid dynamics", in
American
Speech 79.33-58.)
[Update 9/18/06: "Tenser, said the Tensor" writes to point to an entertaining
posting on this blog about orphans, under the name "disabbreviation", with still more examples.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 9, 2006 01:43 PM