Current junk email going around claims that the four-letter word in question derives from the abreviation for Ship High In Transit .
Apparently they used to stencil the abreviation on the side of the containers to keep dried manure from getting wet in the bottom of ship holds, fermenting, creating methane, and exploding when some inquisitive (and apparently olfactorily challenged) sailor ventures in with a lit lantern. Here is a link to one of three web sites I found when searching for anything believable on this topic: exploding dung ships
Anyway, it has all the marks of an urban legend to me. First, it is a redundant abreviation (Ship, Transit), but that doesn’t mean anything, I guess. And it seems unlikely they would ship manure much (and we offer in trade…). And most shipping goods would likely be ruined if they soaked in bilge water, so they’d probably want to put that acronym on everything, which would make it pointless. And the stink would probably be so bad that the explosion would probably be a GOOD thing.
A dictionary is even better. If you discover, as the M-W states, that the word “shit” dates to 1585, you can be absolutely, 100% certain that it is not an acronym. See, acronyms assume an extremely literate population with a large vocabulary. Just the kind of thing that wasn’t around in 1585. Think, off the top of your head, of all the words in common use that are actually acronyms – words like “scuba,” “radar,” etc. Do any of them date back more than a century or so?
Do people just actually not use dictionaries anymore? Is that it?
Not that acronyms are anything new, of course; they appear in ancient cultures (there are acrostic (not quite the same, I know) poems in the Old Testament).
The existence of acrostic poems has nothing to do with the use of acronyms. The fact is that before the twentieth century there were virtually no words derived from acronyms. (One of the rare examples is “O.K.,” which was created in 1839.)
Yes and no. The key here is that the acronym for “Jesus Christ Son of God Savior” (don’t remember the Greek) is not the origin for the word [symbol]icqus[/symbol], meaning “fish”. That was a word which was already lying around, and got an acronymic meaning attached to it. By contrast, “radar”, “scuba”, “laser”, and “Nasa” had no meanings before the acronyms were developed.
Then, too, the acronymic meaning of “[symbol]icqus[/symbol]” was a bit of a secret, so the general illiteracy and non-prevalence of acronyms at the time worked in its favor.
Good point Chronos although this would be not very different to the construction of the acronym for the Sickle Cell Advocates for Research and Empowerment (SCARE).
I suspect that people have been playing tricks like this with language for quite a large chunk of history; the [symbol]icqus[/symbol] acronym being a lonely example perhaps (wild speculation, I’ll admit) only because many of the others didn’t chance to be attached to such persistent concepts.
The annoying thing about all these absurd pseudo-etymologies which claim that pre-twentieth century words came from acronyms is that we know perfectly well what the word came from. “Shit” coming from “Ship High in Transit,” “tip” coming from “To Insure Promptness,” “posh” coming from “Port Out, Starboard Homeward,” “fuck” coming from “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge,” “wog” coming from “Worthy Oriental Gentleman,” “news” coming from “North, East, South, West”: These are all ridiculous. We have a perfectly fine etymology in each case that doesn’t involve an acronym. The supposed phrases from which the acronym is derived are generally tortured rephasings that no one would actually use. Furthermore, these seem to come from people with no real knowledge of how etymology works who are convinced that they can come up with the etymology for a word in five minutes. You can imagine them saying, “What, look for roots in Indo-European? Find cognates in other languages? Read through a huge amount of older literature to find the earliest citation of the word? That’s too much work. If I can’t make up an etymology in a couple of minutes, it’s not worth the effort of thinking about it at all.”
Acrostic poems and the “fish” acronym aren’t really the same “mentality” as modern acronyms. The point of acrostic poems and the “fish” acronym was that they were secret codes. Acrostic poems were clever tricks for the minority who could read and the even smaller minority who bothered to try to interpret the letters in a poem. The point of the “fish” acronym was that Christ was already referred to as a “fisher of men.” Then someone said, "Hey, see how the letters in “fish” could be an acronym for “Jesus Christ Son of God Savior. We could use the word “fish” (or a picture of a fish) as a secret code.”
I don’t see as much difference between [symbol]icqus[/symbol] and some modern acronyms as you suggest, Wendell; often modern acronyms are contrived to make them fit an existing word (like the truly cringe-worthy CEDRIC - Customs & Excise Departmentally Related Intelligence Computer).
I’m not trying to add any weight to the (complete bunk, IMO)idea that any of those words you listed have roots in acronym. My point is that:
Humans like to rearrange things into neat patterns.
Humans tend to see neat patterns in random sets.
There is considerable overlap (in my completely unqualified opinion) between the following mindsets:
“hey, let’s write a poem with each stanza starting with a successive letter of the alphabet”
“hey, you could take the word ‘fish’ and use each of the letters to construct a meaningful phrase”
“hey, if we call it a Departmentally Related Intelligence Computer, it spells CEDRIC”
pldennison is right that “a dictionary is even better”, but not for the right reasons. Any decent dictionary (I just looked in Collins) gives an etymology - you don’t need to use guesswork based on the earliest citation. In this instance the root is the Old English scītan*, of Germanic origin.
I do wonder where this craze for acronymic etymologies came from. I guess it “sounds good” if you explain the origin of such a word to people with a snappy acronym. Or even a lame and convoluted one, evidently.
*that should have an “i” with a line over it - apologies if the Unicode thingy didn’t work
The fact that all your examples are cases of seeing patterns in things doesn’t really show very much. Lots of things can be considered as seeing patterns in things. That’s too vague to be a useful distinction.
The difference between modern acronyms and things like acrostic poems is that the acrostic poems were secret codes. Modern acronyms are cases where someone began referring to an object or an organization by its initials and someone else started pronouncing it as if it was a regular word. At no point was there an attempt in modern acronyms to hide the origin of the word.
It occurs to me that the one pre-twentieth century example of an acronym that I know of (the word “O.K.”) could be considered as an example of a secret code. There was a pseudo-clever trend in Boston in the late 1830’s of misspelling words in a phrase and then using that phrase (and the abbreviation of it) to describe things. Then the people who knew of these expressions could say, “That was really O.K.” with a wink and have their friends know that what they meant was “oll korrect” (i.e., “all correct”). This was thus a case of (the 1830’s equivalent of) young hipsters making up a phrase that only similarly hip people would know.
I don’t even use the hard copy for contesting scrabble anymore.