Too Quick with the Acronym

What is it with me and acronyms? I seem to have become obsessed. But when I read my post about using pronouns clearly I found that I had used one without explaining it. Shame on me!

I referred in that post to Dave from “HR”. While many people likely knew for what words the acronym stood the proper thing to do would have been to write out the phrase and then give the acronym in parentheses if I intended to use it in the rest of the piece. Thus it should have read, “What if I had written about Don, Ted, and Dave from Human Resources?”

If I had continued to talk about the human resources department I would have included (HR) before the question mark and then I would be free to use HR as an acronym (or an abbreviation, if you will) rather than tediously spelling it out each time. Of course, I could have avoided the whole issue by using the word personnel.

All of that merely means that you and I should watch our use of colloquialisms and common abbreviations in our writing. A shortened term that you commonly use may slip right past your internal editor, as it did mine in this case.

By the by, I have a new favorite acronym that I just couldn’t resist sharing with you all. Apparently there exists out there somewhere an organization called Public Hygiene Lets Us Stay Human or PHLUSH. I will resist the urge to make puns and just leave my announcement at that.

Sudden and Complete Acronym Failure

Imagine, if you will, that you read a press release that begins with the following sentence, more or less.

The City of Fargo has installed a HAWK Beacon (High Intensity Activated Crosswalk Beacon)...to aid pedestrians in crossing 40th Avenue S by Centennial Elementary School.

A laudable effort, no doubt, and one that may save the lives of incautious children. I, however, reacted not to the concept of the light but to the apparent inability of the people who created this thing to understand acronyms.

For those of you who don't see the problem here, let me explain. An acronym is a “word” made up of the first letters of a much longer name for something. They're exceedingly useful in talking about government, for example, because the names of agencies can be quite a mouthful. They also take up a lot of room on a page. Once you've explained the origin of the acronym you can write or talk about it and your audience will still know what you mean.

You cannot, however, take random letters from the name of a thing and create an “word” that you like. Doing so means that there is no way someone who sees the acronym would ever guess what those words may be. They might as well have named it a GENERA Beacon, because those letters appear in that order as well. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could just as well have been the NIN. The rules for making acronyms exist for a reason, you know.

What struck me even more strange was that HIAC sounds pretty high-tech and impressive, especially followed by the word beacon. HAWK gives me an impression of swooping and predation. Do I want small children crossing at the street where this HAWK stands, poised and ready? I'd rather a HIAC were watching out for their safety, sending out a beacon to drivers reminding them to be cautious. Wouldn't you?

Some Unexpected Validation

A few months ago, I posted about phrases like way back when. I wondered if the word way should have an apostrophe at its beginning, since it acts as an abbreviation of the word away or the phrase far and away.

The answer that I arrived at was that there is no answer. I could find no indication that the apostrophized version had ever been standard or, indeed, that it had been considered by more than one other person.

Imagine my delight when, in my rereading of Joseph Heller’s delightful Catch 22, I came across the following:

“…if the chaplain’s reticent, unimpressive manner were really just a sinister disguise masking a fiery ambition that, 'way down deep, was crafty and unscrupulous.”

This provides no further information on the etymology of that use of way or away, but I’m relieved to know that I’m not alone in my belief that such phrases warrant an apostrophe. I’d welcome any other examples or opinions, though.

Regarding Punctuation and Some Latin

You may be interested in an on-going discussion in the Helium Writer's Workshop about the overuse of commas. It has expanded into a conversation about how and why to punctuate in general. Rather than rehash my feelings on the matter, I'll just leave you the link.

I have a fresh example of the horrors that public forum posting can wreak on weak writers. A woman another writers' board began a paragraph with this:

“ie; articles that do not make sense”.

After I finished reconstructing my skull, its having exploded, I considered what i.e. meant, here. For those of you who are unaware, the abbreviation stands for the the Latin words “id est” and are translated as “that is”. “The bottom line, i.e. our profit margin, has been rising steadily.”

The abbreviation that this poster intended to use was RE: instead. Note the capitalization and the colon. Had she thought about it, she would (perhaps) have seen that writing out “regarding” (and starting her sentence with a capital letter) would have made her rant easier to read and more convincing.

We won't even address the insidious, apparently contagious, proliferation of the ellipsis. I see it taking over normal paragraphs, turning several sentences into loosely-connected garbage. I've been forced to institute a policy of ignoring all posts in which this problem appears. Not only am I unable to trust the opinions of someone who cannot grasp the most basic piece of punctuation, but my newly-reassembled skull needs to set for a few more weeks before I can expose it to that much stress.

A Question 'Way Too Obscure

I was thinking, today, about the phrase “way more than”. My internal editor was debating with my lazy typing fingers about whether there should be an apostrophe in front of “way”.

The editor reasoned that it was an abbreviation of the phrase “far and away” and thus would require the apostrophe. The fingers argued that the colloquial use had become so prevalent, and that the setting was so casual, as to obviate the need for it. Needless to say, I felt the need to research the question.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms states that it's a variant of the phrase “by far” that arose in the mid-1800s. That's the whole history that I was able to discover. Four Google searches and hundreds of pointless results later, all I uncovered was one other person asking the question. The response that writer got was that the site author had never heard of such a thing and didn't believe that the phrase was the origin of this use of way.

While I hate to post something as singularly unhelpful as this, I'm hoping that you, darling readers, will have an answer to this question. When you write, for instance, that, “Vinyl sounds way better than compact discs,” do you mean, “The sound you get from vinyl is far and away better than that from CDs”? And, if so, have you heard of folks using an apostrophe before way to indicate that?

The Types of Abbreviations

In considering yesterday's post, I decided I was being a tease. I mentioned that you can create different types of abbreviations but I didn't specify what they were much less offer examples. I will rectify that oversight today.

Acronyms
You can abbreviate more than one word into an acronym using the first letter of each word and pronouncing the letters as a word. AIDS and NATO demonstrate this type of abbreviation, although you do not have to write not all acronyms in capital letters. Laser and scuba both stand for terms that people rarely use in their full forms, nor are they generally capitalized.

Initialisms
If the resulting acronym either sounds like another word or is unpronounceable, you can simply say the letters. Governments and military people tend toward these, such as USA, the UN, the EU, and the KGB.

Apheresis
At times, the word you use is an abbreviation of a longer word. When you’ve dropped the first portion of a word, e.g. bus or phone, you’ve used an apheresis. People use the shortened form of these so often that people don’t realize that there is more to the word, like omnibus.

Aphesis
This term could be a source of confusion, as the only difference between this and apheresis lies in the syllable being dropped. When you say, “I danced with Mike ‘cause he’s nicer than Ted,” that first apostrophe indicates that you’ve used an aphesis. You have dropped the unstressed vowel at the beginning of the word “because”. Most of these occur in casual speech and not intentionally in a written piece, outside of dialogue.

Clipped
When you drop the end of a word, you create a clipped form, like “fridge” for “Frigidaire” instead of refrigerator.

Portmanteau or Blend
When you combine two words to make a new one, you’re creating a portmanteau.

I’m running out of steam (and room) to post examples of these. I haven’t even addressed creating abbreviations by leaving out some letters, or by substituting other letters. I didn’t find a term for that practice, because that’s what abbreviating is.

The next time you’re cooking, see how much of your recipe is written in abbreviations. Imagine having to write out “tablespoon”, “ounce”, and “Fahrenheit” every time you needed them and you’ll have a new appreciation for the abbreviation.

Portmanteau or Truncation: What to Call That Abbreviation

I mentioned last week sometime that I was going to research what to call abbreviations like NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo. In my digging, I came across a few options and a distinction I’d not seen before.

Should you ever need to know, separate terms exist for words like SCUBA and LASER (which have become scuba and laser, words that some people don’t ever realize mean more) and CIA. The former example, pronounced as a word, retains its title of acronym, just as I thought. I discovered, however, that abbreviations like many government agencies and television stations are termed initialisms, because you pronounce the individual initials rather than trying to make them into a word.

That didn’t answer my question, but I thought you be interested. As NaNoWriMo fits neither of these definitions, two alternatives remained to me: either abbreviation or truncation. Truncation sounds so abrupt, however, so I was rooting for abbreviation. Then I was silly enough to look for a list of the types of abbreviations.

Ai! I hadn’t thought of the many different ways in which people abbreviate words. I did find a term I had forgotten, however, and one that seems to fit. Abbreviations composed of more than one word enjoy the lovely name of portmanteau. Sure, you could call them a blend of clipped forms, but why waste so many words when a single, French one will do?