My new word

[klwilliams]

The word for today is "solecism", via Joe Haldeman's blog. "Solecism" means, more or less, a word that is commonly misused, like using "schizophrenic" to mean having split personalities, when it really means have a mental break with reality so that you can't tell reality from your own illusions (more or less). Another example of a solecism that Joe used was "acronym". An acronym is the first letters of a phrase that can be pronounced and used as a word in the phrase's place, and is not the first letters of a phrase that are pronounced as letters to replace the phrase. For example, FUBAR, NATO, and LASER are acronyms. ATM, IBM, and HTML are not.

As Spock would say, "Fascinating."

Comments

acronym

[dame-cordelia.livejournal.com]

I had to read that definition and examples twice before I "got" it.

[edanam.livejournal.com]

The way I always differentiate between acronyms & initial is... can you make a sentence out of it with the initials making a verb.

They really FUBAR'd -- an acronym
Can they IBM the PC -- doesn't make sense

This doesn't work with some acronyms (like NATO), but does make for amusing hallway conversations with silly engineers. :-)

[fionnbharro.livejournal.com]

How about "IBM IT FUBAR'd my PC"?

[fionnbharro.livejournal.com]

Re: "Solecism"

How nice.

You've made a quantum leap in knowledge, today.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Ha ha.

[fionnbharro.livejournal.com]

I wonder what one calls a 'Mistaken Acronym' -- Meaining: Is there a word that means 'Mistaken Acronym'?

Remember the first Gulf War? We were worried about Soviet-produced "SCUD missiles" hitting Israel or other nearby countries.

As if "SCUD" was an acronym: it's not. It's transliterated from the Russian meaning 'Fast'. They're properly "Scud Missiles".

Reclaiming the word "acronym"

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I know what "acronym" is supposed to mean, but I assert that it doesn't mean that. It's been misused so much that the broader sense is now the correct sense—at least in American speech.

It doesn't help that hardly anybody knows what to call something like "HTML"; Wikipedia calls it an initialism, but I had never heard the term before I read it there.

Re: Reclaiming the word "acronym"

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I've heard the term "initialism" before, but not often.

I'm fundamentally opposed to words changing their meanings just because most people don't know what the word is supposed to mean. I'm the same with spelling and grammar.

Re: Reclaiming the word "acronym"

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way, mostly, but this particular battle seems to have been lost before I was born—probably because nobody knew what to call the things that weren't acronyms. If we had a better word than "initialism", and if it had been promulgated 50 years ago, then maybe the distinction would've been preserved.

Re: Reclaiming the word "acronym"

[martianfencer.livejournal.com]

At MHC, students complain about there being too many TLA's (three letter acronyms).

Re: Reclaiming the word "acronym"

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. From the Jargon File entry for TLA:

In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin “What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?” Paul's straight-faced response: “There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms.” (To be exact, there are 26^3 = 17,576.)

[darcyjavanne.livejournal.com]

I love the way language develops. Solecism has been a favorite word of mine for a long time.