Acronyms -vs- Initialisms

Factual Questions
1

Dear Cecil and/or The Teaming Minions,

Recently I got into a heated debate that had nothing to do with the the election between Gore and Bush (who in my opinion should just rule the appropriate blue or red states that they won and get over it!). :wink:

No, this debate was to do with an ancient memory of mine where I once believed that an “acronym,” was a pronounceable word (or some homonymic facsimile thereof) formed from the initial letters of a multi-word name. An “initialism,” was also taken from the first letter or sound of each word, but you had to voice each letter separately, and there was no the requirement that it be an existing word. So, “MAD” is an acronym for “Mutual Assured Destruction,” as is “MADD” for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. And EVA (“extra-vehicular activity”) and IRS are initialisms because they need to be a spoken as individual letters. “OPEC” is one that kind of falls in the neutral zone. On the one hand, we pronounce it and it sounds like a word. On the other, there is no other homonymic meaning we might infer.

My friend argued that the term “acronym (which began sometime during WWII)” is used to cover ALL instances of these abbreviations, while I suggested it was being used incorrectly, but popularly so. I said the term, “Initialism (which dates to the late 1800’s)” should be used to identify those that do not form pronounceable names. The problem here is that it seems we’re both right to some degree. We’ve both searched unabridged dictionaries on and offline and there IS genuine contradiction. American Heritage support my basic assertions, and Websters vaguely supports his. I say “vaguely” because other than tossing out examples, they don’t really define what a “word” is. There should be a modifier there saying “an existing word or homonymic reference” [clearly my preference], OR a “new word not previously in existence.”

All we could finally agree upon is that the term acronym has probably been misused long enough now that it has become a catch-all phrase of sorts. But should it?

I debated as to whether it’s possible that “common usage” of the TERMS used to describe language should be subject to the ignorance and misuse of the illiterate. In other words, what if people on the internet began using the word “noun” to refer to words that were clearly “verbs?..” Hip-Hop language is one thing for rap and the kids, but when the word “language” no longer means language, how can we study it without being able to use it? We know it’s impossible to not think when studying the thought process, so it seems to me that we must have some rules of writing to talk about speech. What happens to language when there is no differentiation in the TERMS we use to describe and analyze it. Everyone already knows that language (common usage) itself is in constant flux. :slight_smile: But should the structure by which we describe and understand it be subject to the same chaos? I think that’s a huge mistake if we’re genuinely making it.

Another theory of mine (completely unresearched in this case) regards what might have happened historically to cause the confusion.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, we didn’t have machines and “things” that had long, complicated name that the general public needed to refer to. So we only had initialisms. Around the dawn of the 20th century machines became more and more a part of the public’s daily SPOKEN life and people needed an easier way to insert them into conversations. So (I’m purely hypothesizing here, mind you) it seems acronyms popped up to handle the one’s that made a word, rather than a series of pronounced letters. I’m sure the armed forced had something to do with that, and maybe it made radio or coded communiques easier. But no one really bothered to distinguish between the two, or if they did, current usage (Past 20 years or so of the PC/internet/information revolution) didn’t and the distinctions were lost. What do you think? Possible? Probable? Who knows? Any etymologists out there?

BTW, there’s yet another type of abbreviation happening now and it’s unique to the internet. It’s this ROTFL, LOL, IMHO, stuff. We don’t pronounce it vocally and it’s only a typed/written abbreviation, at least thus far. What should these be called in this context?

There should be a different terms for different abbreviations like the UPS and BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). I think there USED TO be, and that would explain the vague and contradictory dictionary entries.

I can’t believe how this particular etymological debate has inflamed me thus, but there you have it. Go ahead and tell me I need to get a life and then do your own research into the dissension. It gets curiouser and curiouser the more you dig. I’m hoping Cecil himself will weigh in on this one with some serious SOB* on the SD.** :wink:

MichaelG
*Sarcastic Onerous Brilliance
**Straight Dope, of course!

2

As soon as you figure out how to settle the “evolving language” vs. “we need certain rules” debate, please let everyone know. It’s been going on for hundreds of years. As far as I can tell, there’s no clear answer.

I would agree with you that “acronym” means and initialism that’s pronounced as a word, so I’ll use it only that way. But then, I pronounce “forte” and “fort” the same, and the “i” in “short-lived” with a long-i sound. I tend to fall to the more conservative side of the argument, maybe because I’m conservative about everything else, but you can’t take an absolutist view of it. As soon as you do, one of these wishy-washy types will come along and point out several good, solid words that were once frowned upon by people like us.

3

We are right, your friend is wrong. My Oxford dictionary, American Heritage, and a very old paperback Webster’s agree. (There was a thread on the SDMB a few months ago about the “acronyms” used on the MB (IMHO, etc.); I, of course, had to hijack it briefly to point out that they are not acronyms. Regarding the hi-tech abbreviations you mention…they are abbreviations. But maybe the techies will invent a catchier word, which is fine with me – just don’t call them acronyms. :smiley:

4

An acronym is the kind of thing that most people refer to when they say “acronym”. All the dictionary definitions in the world will not change that. It’s a foolish dictionary indeed that goes against the most popular usage.

In my experience, words like “VCR”, “ATM”, “GDP”, and “NAFTA” are refered to by most people as acronyms. People usually don’t refer to words that have become lower case ordinary words as acronyms, even when their derivation is as an initialism (e.g. radar, a common example given in ditionaries). Nor does how the acronym is pronounced make any difference.

After checking several dictionaries I have at hand, pretty much all of them are foolish in their definition of acronym.

5

So you have decided that the dictionaries are “foolish”???
Hmmm…that means there are an awful lot of English professors, linguists, etymologists, lexicographers, etc. out there who are not as smart as you. NAFTA is an acronym because it’s pronounceable, and is said as a word, not individual initials. As for “radar,” (“laser” is another good example) people don’t know it’s an acronym because it’s been around so long and has become a word.

6

dtilque writes: "An acronym is the kind of thing that most people refer to when they say “acronym”. All the dictionary definitions in the world will not change that. It’s a foolish dictionary indeed that goes against the most popular usage. "

[hey, how do you quote someone here when you want to reply? :confused: ]

Anyway, maybe this is the larger question. While the vast majority of language certainly IS subject to the misuse of the masses, and thus the term “popular usage” should really be “popular misusage,” should the terminology used to describe it? I think it should not. I’m not a language snob at all and lived in Japan for 10 years and watched what happened to English when they brought it into Japanese. It was instantly unrecognizable, but kind of cool in some instances. “Air conditioner” became “aircon.” Geez, why didn’t we think of that? Who has all that time for the extra syllables these days anyway?! :smiley:

But what if chemistry was subject to the same whim of the popular misuse of the terms used to describe processes? Chemists will find it harder to communicate and thus discover and innovate. [assuming for the moment that “innovation” is something that can occur in Chemistry] Nobody really cares about gerunds and dangling participles anymore in a culture where it’s cool to walk around with your pants falling off. “Bad” can mean “good,” “bomb” can mean “great,” and then there’s “The President of the Red States” who’s not terribly worried about “submliminbull” rats in his “clean” campaign ads. Everyone TALKS about the sorry state of education in this country, and how the Germans, and the Japanese (and most of Asia, actually) are kicking our sorry ignorant butts once again. But here’s a small instance where “popular opinion” seems to be more important than the right answer. The English are a freewheeling culture too, but do you see them renaming the tools of the language they named their country after! Bloody right, you don’t! :smiley: In fact, the typical British “High School” dropout has a larger vocabulary than most Americans with a college degree! So why does America have to be so ignorant and proud of it? When did ignorance become “cool,” or “bad,” or “the bomb?”

So my point remains, whatever the proper usage of the abbreviation terms “acronym” and “initialism” may be, I think they should not be subject to the sliding IQ of this great nation of ours. And quite frankly, if we can’t speak, spell, or write with any evidence of intelligence (or shame at the lack thereof), I believe that we are not ready for Zen koans either. "An acronym is the kind of thing that most people refer to when they say “acronym.” Yes, I’m starting to embrace the meaning inside of the meaninglessness of that statement, but does the rest of the country appreciate it’s depth? :wink:

Reflectively Yours,

mick

7

In order to quote someone, place {quote}text{/quote} around the quotation, but change { to [ and change } to ].

For example:

Hogwash!

I’ve met enough Brits of all educational levels to know that such a generalization is simply not supportable.
As to the ability of hoi polloi to change the meanings of words, I’m afraid that they will always win. The best you can hope for is to set aside a technical term into a technical jargon so that within the context of that jargon it will have a fixed meaning. (E.g., it is fairly easy to find military purists who carefully distinguish between shrapnel and shell fragments–and who will huffily point out that shrapnel has not been used in the memory of living man–but outside that close-knit group of military types, shrapnel simply means “things that hit you after an explosion” and that usage can be found in respected newpapers and (non-military) essays and fiction throughout the breadth of spoken and written English.)

8

As the words are “properly” used, an initialism is any expression formed from the initial letters of a set of other words, and an acronym is a special case of an initialism where the resulting expression is pronounceable, regardless of whether the pronounciation matches an existing word. Personally, I try to stick with the “proper” usage here, but then again, I also use “whence” and “whither”, and other such archaisms.

9

OK, calling dictionaries “foolish” was perhaps not the best way of putting it. Let me try again.

As I see it, there are three ways you can define acronym:

  1. technical jargon. Based on the examples given, this seems to be what most dictionaries use. It’s a technical definition of the etymologists, not of linguists. Since etymologists are primarily concerned with ordinary, lowercased words, what they consider acronyms are that handful of such that derive from initialisms. There’s less than 20 of these that have made it into most dictionaries (radar, laser, sonar, scuba, snafu, and canola being the most common). For the most part, acronyms are no challenge to etymologists except perhaps in quashing false acronym etymologies (e.g. cop supposedly from Constable On Patrol).

  2. descriptivist definition: Go out and see what people are calling an acronym. This is what a linguist would actually do and what the dictionaries should be doing. For most words they do. They don’t seem to be doing that for this word.

  3. prescritivist definitions: There’s several of these and they seem to be based on various ideas of what a word is. The most common seem to be:

– a) pronounced differently than a sequence of letters. This one runs into problems when some people pronounce an acronym as a sequence of letters and others have some other pronunciation. UPS (United Parcel Service) is one example I know of where that happpens.

– b) spelled the same as an ordinary word, except that it’s capitalized. These are sometimes called “bacronyms”, since they are usually coined backwards. That is, people come up with a word that evokes the desireable idea and then come up with a multi-word term that acronyzes to that word. NOW (National Organization for Women) is perhaps the archtypical example. On very rare occasions, this happens naturally, e.g. MAD (Mutually Assured Distruction).