**…or, When Did Acronyms Stop Having Periods? **
You used to see them written out like this:
and I always thought it looked ungainly and was a PITA (uh, P.I.T.A.) to write, but in my school years I used to get spellling & grammar credits removed for writing acronyms without the periods.
One day I looked up and realized that the rest of the world had come to its collecive senses (possibly even 5th grade English teachers) and dropped the notion that people would be unable to comprehend that FAA or UN or RIAA were abbreviations with each letter standing for a word.
I agree with you that acronyms look lots better without the dots. No doubt there are curmudgeons about who think it’s a harbinger of The End Of Civilization As We Know It.
I’m not sure where they started to drop them, but I think NASA was a leader in this movement. I don’t think they ever used periods in “NASA”, and certainly not after they started using that san serif logo.
I’m talking about the acronym NASA itself, not the plethora of acronyms they used internally at NASA. Someone familiar with internal documentation will have to address that.
Curiously, as we were watching the scrolls on one of the news channels this weekend, my wife and I noticed that they (as well as the closed-captioning) were referring to the “F.B.I.” and the “CIA,” which really puzzled us. Why the inconsistency?
I do distinctly remember reading a Cecil column on this, but repeated searching yields nothing.
He put the blaim on the Brits!
Supposedly the habit of ignoring the periods started there. For example one might look at eg and ie (which you merkins would probably write e.g. and i.e.) The standard spelling in UK is without the dots.
Michael Quinion has an enjoyable collection of some brittish ones in his World Wide Words: http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/acronyms.htm
I, for one, think it makes both reading and writing easier. I would get confused if I had to write RA.D.A.R (for RAdio Detection And Ranging) and keep in mind that it should be I.S.S, but MIR for the space stations, G.P.S, but GL.O.NA.SS for the Global Positioning Systems. I also think that the sprinkling of dots in technical writing would make it difficult to decipher which of them is a full stop.
Let’s get rid of them altogether!
“Mir” can also mean “peace”, as far as I know. That is really cued: The same word for peace and world. And yes, the station name is not an acronym, it is simply a Russian word.
I don’t think there’s a binding rule on this. Everybody uses his/her own way of spelling acronyms, although each country seems to have a preference for one way (French, for example, seem to almost always put the dots; Germans almost never do, the F.D.P., the only German party to do so officially, got a derogative nickname from this habit). I myself prefer the dotless version, it’s easier to type and more comfortable to read I think.
By the way, I’d love to add one similar question: Is there a name for acronyms that read out as a reasonable word (often related to the topic)? The Committee for American Remittances to Europes is shorted as CARE, which makes sense since it did take care for Europeans after WWII.
My point exactly! The idea with the periods is to put them wherever characters have been removed. Thus you would have to know that MIR is not an acronym (and shouldn’t have any dots), whereas I.S.S is an initialism and where the dots are there used to be “I[sub]nternational[/sub] S[sub]pace[/sub] S[sub]tation[/sub]”.
The original definition of acronym is a word formed by the initial parts (often letters) of the constituent words, that can be spoken.
If the last part is not fullfilled it is (to many) an initialism. Thus NATO is an acronym, but ISS is an initialism! (Although nowadays everything gets called acronym. I think English has lost a valuable distinction, but my view is in minority)
And thanks Schnitte for the link to the column! Even though it doesn’t really address the subject under discussion. Sorry to bring it up.
Sorry if this has been said. It’s early yet and I read through this pretty quickly.
The classic answer is that you’re talking about two different things, which complicates the issue and helps explain why even reputable sources get it wrong from time to time.
An initialism is a type of abbreviation in which you use the initials of words from a long term (say, Federal Bureau of Investigation) to create a shorter term (in this case, F.B.I.), which you then use to refer to the original term. Initialisms should take periods, because they are not pronounceable as words themselves. You don’t, in this example, actually try to pronounce the new term (“fibby”?) you just say the letters (“eff-bee-eye”, Hannibal voice optional).
An acronym is an initialism you can pronounce as a word (“NASA” or the down-graded to common word example “scuba”). They do not take periods.
