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

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.