🚀 go-pugleaf

chocolatemalt wrote:
> In article <436bdb38$0$11077$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl>,
>  Casper H.S. Dik <Casper.Dik@Sun.COM> wrote:

>>Nope; acronyms are "nyms" and therefor they are "words" which
>>can be pronounced.

> Huh.  Right you are... I had thought any capitalized abbreviation 
> applied for that term, but only the subset of examples like RADAR and 
> LASER make the cut.  Thanks for setting me straight.  And I thought I 
> spent too much time in the dictionary already.  :P  BTW, I get "name" 
> for "nym", where "word" would be "logos" in Greek, but the sense you're 
> using is the same.  Bummer about this enlightenment too -- terms like CB 
> and CPU deserve something less stodgy than "initialism", ick.
> 
> Hmm... In my defense, I notice that numerous websites with "acronym" 
> lists freely use it to describe any initialism at all.  Not that it's 
> "correct" of course, but if misunderstanding becomes conventional and 
> the dictionary changes in a few years, it wouldn't be the first time.

Your usage of the article "the" with the noun "dictionary" is a curious
one.  m-w.com already counts "FBI" as an acronym.

The Oxford American Dictionary that comes with Mac OS X says an acronym
is "a word formed from the initial letters of other words" and gives
the examples "radar" and "snafu".  Note that neither of these is in all
caps, whereas according to how I understand the rules of English, it is
not acceptable for words to be spelled with all uppercase (with the
exception of one-letter words).  So, while being pronounceable is a
qualification, so is having a spelling that doesn't require all caps.

My point is that if "CPU" can't be an acronym because acronyms are
words and words are pronounceable, then "SMART" can't be an acronym
either, because even though it is pronounceable, acronyms are words
and words aren't written in all uppercase.  While I can see a case
for excluding certain things from word status (and thus acronym status),
I can't see why being pronounceable is more important than being
written in lowercase.

To put it another way, if an acronym needs to be a word, then "SCUBA",
though pronounceable, is an abbreviation (for "Self-Contained Underwater
Breathing Apparatus") and thus not a word and not an acronym, but
"scuba" is a word dervied from the abbreviation SCUBA and thus is a
word and is an acronym.

Personally, though, I think the most common usage of the term acronym
allows abbreviations to be acronyms (most people would say "SCUBA" is
an acronym), thus there is no requirement that they are words, and
thus unpronounceable things can be acronyms as well.

   - Logan