🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <51ruji$ec0@news.inforamp.net>, tom collins
<tcollins@inforamp.net> wrote:

[clipped a fine analysis]
 
> But I doubt if any country will ever match the American style 
> to the degree this practice exists there.

The U.S., as a "country" is e pluribus unum. One can expect that the
European Economic Community will find plenty to be brief about as well. 

Dr. McLuhan had noted how our phonetic alphabet had divorced language from
nature, and how electric technology especially had revived the mythic
"all-at-onceness" quality of preliterate or tribal experience. McLuhan
suggested that a myth explains in an instant a rather complex process that
occurs over a long period of time. We might include the possibility that
acronyms and initialisms developed as a linguistic response to the
preference "in our time" for the cool medium. LED is cool; light emitting
diode is hot.

I guess I'm trying here to shore up Tom's "launching pad" idea with a
Canadian theorist's idea. After all, McLuhan places the electric
mythic/tribal threshold at Morse's telegraph (c. 1844), and we all know
what dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot spells and means; but I (for
one) have no idea what it stands for. It's an acronym or initialism
without a "content," as the electric light, according to McLuhan, is a
medium without any content: it's "pure information."

So, relying on McLuhan (whom I miss terribly), I would add that our
proliferation of acronyms and intitialisms derives from our unconscious
mythic and tribal awareness. Brevity, instant recognition, incomplete
detail, and mass awareness are the telltale signals that the medium is the
message. I think "disk operating system" is now invariably only an answer
to a very ingenuous question.

Nothing aside, but the Cabalistic linguists hold that the Hebrew of
Genesis (for instance) consists of the equivalent of acronyms, where each
letter itself is a word (in the sense that we use these terms today). And
of course the word "alphabet" itself should remind us that acronyms
existed long before the word "acronym" was coined.

Although Essex and Sussex are very old, non-American acronyms, perhaps the
use of "U.S." "U.K." and "U.S.S.R." (even in Russian an initialism) was
also fuel on the launching pad. Dunno, but hope the thread grows.

-- 
Stuart R. Leichter