I always thought SWAG was Simple Wild A** Guess.
SWAT = Special Weapons and Tactics
Then why isn’t it Ohhkay or Ohkay?
What about when they made up LORAN from LOng RAnge Navigation?
Who knows. The Greek akron means end or tip, so based on the etymology you could argue that it’s reasonable that the meaning isn’t restricted to just single initial letters.
So I should provide a cite of someone else’s personal observations?
[quote=“Karen_Lingel, post:20, topic:810050”]
More categories:
[li]Unpronouncable acronyms that became words anyway: like okay and emcee.[/li][/QUOTE]
Funny that I have no problem at all pronouncing either of those words.
Because that’s not a natural way of writing those phonemes in English. We write open, not ohhpen.
I thought Karen’s meaning was pretty clear. The original acronyms would have been “OK” and “MC”, which don’t look like normal English words with any obvious pronunciation. Okay and emcee are pronounceable, but they are not the acronyms, they are invented words to represent the sound of the sequence of spelled-out letters in unpronounceable acronyms.
You have, however, now provided a valid cite in support of your prior contention that there is an unusually high proportion of anal-retentive nerds on SDMB.
I still don’t understand what this means, or what the relevance is.
Pel-mell doesn’t seem to have any connection to the OP’s question. It has been around for a long time and was never an acronym:
Shakespeare also used it.
That one bothered me, because you know some team stayed up all night to get something that spelled out “USA PATRIOT” but didn’t sound outrageously tortured to do so. But it’s just not worth the trouble. Nobody thinks it’s cute, and nobody cares what the damned acronym is – Just call it the "USA Patriot Act’ right off the bat, and spare us the wordplay.
It reminds me of one I heard of when I was a kid – a biotelemtry system for studying whales at sea in the form of a robotic fish called the Motorized Observation Biotelemetry Yacht-Data, Integration, and Control, or MOBY-DIC.
Names made up so that their acronyms will form a word are “backronyms”.
This has been stated more than once in this thread, starting with #6
Mr Bond defeated (several times) the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. Would the last two be reversed in the USA?
The APGAR score comes from the name of Virginia Apgar (1909–74), a US anesthesiologist who developed the method for measuring the physical condition of a newborn infant. You obtain an Apgar score by adding points (0, 1, or 2) for skin colouration (Appearance), heart rate (Pulse), response to stimulation (Grimace), muscle tone (Activity), and respiratory effort (Respiration).
My point, which I admit was probably not obvious, is that pronouncing letters is not significantly different than pronouncing words. It’s not like someone made up an unpronounceable symbol for them.
Oh, guilty of that. I fit in well here among my fellow nerds.
D.A.R.E. or…Drug Abuse Resistance Education. It was part of the “just say no” 80s, early 90s. They were antidrug classes “taught” by active police officers meant to scare elementary school students straight into a life of sobriety. I even remember the name of my DARE teacher: Officer Hazzard (no lie). If it wasn’t for him, god, I’d be pretty much…exactly the same.
ETA: “DARE to keep your kids off drugs!” was one of their slogans.
What the poster is asking about is an acronym, which is a word made from letters.
But always misspelled.
The US Navy has a new system for automating carrier landings - Maritime Augmented Guidance with Integrated Controls for Carrier Approach and Recovery Precision Enabling Technologies. Purely by coincidence, the acronym is MAGIC CARPET.
Since the portmanteau is back+acronym, either spelling makes sense, and both are prevalent.
Necessary, but not sufficient. (Those are some more words made from letters.)
Evidence for the anal-retentiveness of SDMBers continues to mount.
Ugh!