I’m 50 but don’t really recall these acronyms really only coming into common use the last 10 years or so. Or maybe I just am more aware of it now.
Your thoughts?
Funny, just today I was listening to NPR and asked myself the same thing. Maybe first heard the terms maybe 5yrs ago…Which kinda coincides with me paying more attention…maybe?
The West Wing, which aired in 1999, used POTUS in its pilot episode. It was familiar to me then. I don’t recall when I first heard it though.
Apparently both POTUS and SCOTUS these had been in use for a while in press shorthand – particularly in a wire service style format (since telegraph required saving characters) called the Phillips Code dating to the late 1800s. From that first cite it seems it began spreading within the executive office under Nixon, started being used openly openly in print rather than as trade insider lingo in the Reagan years and late in the Clinton Administration it escaped into the wild, as it were, which does coincide with my recollection.
I suppose Bill could become HOPOTUS rather than the hard to pronounce GPOTUS…
I don’t think I had heard POTUS before West Wing. I don’t recall hearing SCOTUS until just a few years ago.
My first exposure to both was on this board, in the early-to-mid aughts. I wasn’t a regular viewer of West Wing, so I would have missed that.
I first saw the acronym POTUS in the book The White House Mess by Christopher Buckley (William F. Buckley, Jr.'s son) in 1986, so I’ve been familiar with it for at least that long. However, it’s much older than that, as JRDelirious mentioned. According to Merriam-Webster, POTUS first showed up as a code used by telegraph operators in 1895. SCOTUS is even older than that. It showed up in telegraph messages as early as 1879.
The first time I recall encountering it was in Tom Clancy books in the '90s, FWIW.
But if you remember there was a trailer of the opening scene of the pilot where all the characters say “Potus is this…” “Potus is that…” and gag being only at the end revealing that “Potus” is actually President of the United States which makes it clear that they expected no one to know the abbreviation.
I am pretty sure while the West Wing didn’t invent it, they popularized it and people discussing politics on line and wanting a short acronym to type made it even more common.
I’m not debating the scene, but never the less, I know I was familiar with it when the episode aired. It may not have been popular but it wasn’t unheard of. I listened to a lot of NPR, so maybe it was from there.
I know it was in use as far back as the Nixon administration, but wasn’t common then.
Was USSC ever used for the Supreme Court? Obviously it’s officially “Supreme Court of the United States” (hence SCOTUS), but for some reason I always instinctively want to abbreviate it as USSC (“United States Supreme Court”) and I feel like I must have picked that up from somewhere.
I used USSC for awhile in my emails with other lawyers but no one seemed to know what it meant. SCOTUS has been in pretty widespread use for about a decade, I’d say.
William Safire, in his 1978 political novel Full Disclosure, had the President’s mistress use “Potus” as her nickname for him since it was less formal than “Mr. President” but she thought it was more respectful than calling him by first name. I don’t remember seeing it used again until The West Wing’s pilot episode, after which it went mainstream.
But it was not in common use. Cuddy the hooker saw it and said “Your boss has a funny name . Potus.”
I know. I watched the episode. My point was that it was already familiar to me, so it wasn’t completely obscure then.
If you mean as the spouse, it would likely be FGOTUS, since the first lady is FLOTUS. I first heard the terms in general use when I was working for the Department of State in the 90s.
FGOTUS? Fuhgeddaboudit!
Probably my first exposure too.
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Since people started texting on cell phones, they have become lazy and no longer spell out entire words.
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People assume everybody else in the world knows what all these abbreviations mean.
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Good communication skills are that the reader fully understands what you are trying to communicate. More people will understand what you are saying if you DON’T use abbreviations.
Note: Newspapers instruct their reporters to write so a lesser educated person will be able to understand what they are writing about. These reporters go to college and learn a bunch of big words… Then are instructed to not use those big words!
Of course you would need to have empathy to understand what other people need.
Some may spell it F’GOATUS, considering his past sexual escapades.