Wouldn’t have sounded right, since the central bank (ya know, monetary policy, etc.) is already called Banque du Canada.
Another plea for common sense here — Yes, most people don’t know that, for example, “radar” stands for radio detection and ranging. But that doesn’t mean it no longer stands for radio detection and ranging. It still does.
On another note, I read a few years ago that FFA is now just FFA, not Future Farmers of America.
Acronym, if you’re a pig.
I had a ColecoVision in the eighties, well after the manufacturer had stopped calling itself the Connecticut Leather Company.
And Sunoco is still around, as is Esso.
The “official” name of the standard was Personal Computer Memory Card International Association, but as you indicated, the unofficial version was much more widely known.
Zombie.
Seriously, there ought to be a rule that you have to at least read a thread before posting to it.
The thread is a general question. So what if it is a zombie? There’s no reason why new answers to the factual question are any less informative than old answers.
And if one isn’t?
My point was just that the distinction between “acronym” and “abbreviation” is not so clear-cut now that acronyms are ubiquitous and spelled and voiced in lots of ways. It’s not clear enough to justify pedantry.
URL is another example (some say “U R L”, others say “earl”).
I disagree with this nitpick. Both of those are examples of abbreviations. The specific term for the second type you mention is initialism. IOW, acronyms are abbreviations that you can pronounce and initialisms are ones you can’t. Here’s a good wiki page and it gives some examples including ones that are combinations of the two.
CATV, which people use to mean “cable television”, with cable networks and so on. It originally stood for “Community Antenna Television”. Cable started as a way to get broadcast tv in fringe areas. Somebody would put up a big huge antenna with appropriate transmission equipment, and charge people a fee to run cables to nearby houses. Some of these things were local coop arrangements. Eventually they realized there was a whole lot of unused bandwidth, and they started supplementing their offerings with local programming on unused channels and so on. Eventually, whole cable networks arose.
It’s quite possible to read the content without looking at the dates. Or, for that matter, the authors.
Nah, you’ve just nitpicked my nitpick.
I did say that acronyms are abbreviations that can be said aloud. Therefore acronyms are a particular type of abbreviation, and so are initialisms. But whereas all of the examples in the thread were abbreviations, they were not all acronyms.
And is it really a zombie if it’s from earlier this year, or just kind of not-quite-dead-yet?
Yep and both your nitpicks are meaningless and impractical as I’ve tried to point out.
A word like URL may be spoken differently by different people, and many even write it in lowercase in practice, so I don’t see where you’d even begin to classify it.
In fact, the distinction between acronym and abbreviations has become so meaningless I’m glad that “acronym” is becoming an umbrella term in casual usage.
Then don’t take any canoe rides through Georgia.
zymotic obtuse message brought into eyesight
Necco = New England Candy Company
I actually pronounce SQL as “sequel”. I don’t think I’m the only one…
I’m guessing he pronounces SQL something like “squeel”, although like Jas09 below, I pronounce it “sequel”. Isn’t that standard?
AO Sound
I still see this at the end of movies. The AO Sound system was originally the accompaniment to the Todd-AO Wide-Screen system, a sort of pre-IMAX projection system that used state-of-the-art anamorphic lenses and needed a special “wraparound” screen for projection. There were very few of these theaters, and very few movies made for it, but they included Oklahoma!, Around the World in 80 Days, and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. If you saw any of thedse films in a regular theater, or have seen VHS or DVD versions, or on television, you have missed a big part of the presentation, and most of the picture. look up “Todd-AO” with a search engine.
The “AO” part was American Optical, because they designed the lenses. AO was one of the biggest optics companies in the world at the time – they provided eyeglasses to most of the US, and equipment to Opticians and ophthalmologists. Later on they went into pioneering fiber optics and inventing the neodymium glass laser and the like. The company was broken up and sold piecemeal by the last owners shortly after the company’s 150th anniversary, with the last chunk of it sold off in 2004. Aside from possibly an office in Connecticut, there is no more AO. But the name of the sound system associated with their venture into movies remains as a legacy of the company.
Actually, I’ve always used the banal pronounciation “Ess-Queue-Ell”.
I flip between that and pronouncing each letter, with no logic behind why I choose one over the other.