When question arise about acronymic origins of FU#K or POSH, somebody usually says acronyms were not used before the year yaddayadda. However, millions of young Christians are taught, as I was, that the outline of a fish was used as a secret sign of recognition among early Christians in the days when worshipping Jesus could get you thrown in jail. Why a fish? Because the initial letters of a Greek phrase about Jesus spelled out the Greek word for fish. That was a lot earlier than the year yaddayadda, soooo… Either the fish=Christian story is bogus or acronyms go way back.
The story of the fish=Jesus symbolism actually depends on several different images from the New Testament. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the [url=“http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06083a.htm”]Catholic Encyclopedia - 1907 - 1919* was including the ICHTHUS acrostic (rather than acronym) in its article. Their reference to Jesus as the son of God being contrasted against the claim of the Roman emperor to be the Son of God makes sense, but they do not actually provide a reference for a place where either the acrostic or an acronym was used. The Romans were in the habit of using abbreviations (notably SPQR, Senatus PubliusQue Romanorum), but we really don’t know how often or how well that practice translated into “general” uses among the people–particularly the illiterate masses.
One argument in favor of the acrostic approach was the common reference to the fish in Alexandia, both a center of learning (indicating somewhat higher literacy) and a location where Greek remained the language of the literate.
On the other hand, we are still speculating with probabilities, plausibilities, and best guesses.
A point made in the article that I did not emphasize sufficiently, is that the symbol of the fish can be used as an allusion to “fishers of men” or “loaves and fishes” or other references with no need to invoke the acrostic/acronym ICHTHUS.
I would imagine that people have been playing games with written words ever since they started using them.
Here’s an interesting (but not entirely related to the OP) reference: Paternoster Magic Square that documents an apparently quite old (second century) and extremely clever wordplay device.
It wasn’t all that odd for people to make acronyms for religious purposes even earlier than that (at the Jewish Seder, there is an acronym for the ten plagues, for instance).
But these acronyms never made it into the language as words; they were just acronyms or mnemonics. English language words were not coined by acronyms for phrases until the 20th century (“radar” may be the earliest example).
Re: Acronymic Origins of Fuck, you don’t need to dispute that acronyms were used during that time-frame to totally debunk that, you can trace the origins of that word to Old English, where I believe it originally meant to hit or strike. That ‘FUCK stands for For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge’ is one of the most annoying urban legends for me.
Thanks Gaspode. That thread refers to the word detective, who does say that “acronyms were very rare in English before World War II”, but he doesn’t say that they didn’t exist. The OP seems to be trying to prove that they did exist, but nobody seems to have said that they didn’t exist.
Abreviations seem to be very common indeed in the written material which survives, but that may have something to do with the fact that a lot of what survives is engraved in metal or stone and brevity is a virtue when a substantial physical effort is involved in creating each letter.
As you say, it’s not at all clear how far these would have penetrated the consciousness of the illiterate masses. And in any event, they weren’t pronouncable acronyms but simple abbreviations.
Thanks, TomH, I knew I should have double-checked that. (And when I did check it, the last word turned out to be “of Rome,” Romanus, rather than “of the Romans,” Romanorum.) So the actual correct expansion of S.P.Q.R. (provided my source is correct) would be Senatus Populusq*ue Romanus*.