The Cult of Abbreviation Tommcarthur

The Cult of Abbreviation TOMMcARTHUR

If lexical abbreviation is no more than a fringe to vocabulary proper, it is a most diverse and dynamic fringe

IN SEPTEMBER 1986, the American refer- The nature of abbreviation ence publishers Gale Research Company sent out a press release that began: What is the The following is an extract from Time fastest growing language in the world? The magazine (7 July 86): 'Last December CGE answer then provided was: 'abbrevomania' or seemed to have concluded a joint venture 'initialese'. •with AT&T and its Dutch partner Philips. In The purpose of the press release was to that deal, AT&T-Philips would have taken promote the second edition of the Inter- over 16% of France's telephone network in return for helping a CGE subsidiary, Alcatel, national Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbrevi- ations Dictionary, the short form of whose title market telephone equipment in the US.' is the I Al AD. This epic has 911 pages, claims At least five factors are relevant to the over 110,000 entries, costs $160.00, and is discussion of this or any similar extract: edited by Julie E. Towell and Helen 1. Short forms like 'US', 'AT&T', 'CGE' E.Sheppard. It also has a companion epic, the and 'Alcatel' range, in terms of our under- Reverse I Al AD, which orders the entries by standing, from the transparent to the opaque. the full forms of the abbreviations, and costs Most people know some abbreviations well $175.00. These American products dwarf a British equivalent, the Everyman Dictionary of Ab- TOM McARTHUR was born in Glasgow in 1938. breviations (or EDOB), whose second edition A graduate of both Glasgow and Edinburgh also appeared in 1986. This work is published universities, he has been in turn an officer-instructor in by Dent, edited by John Paxton, costs the British Army, a school-teacher in the Midlands of £10.95, has 389 pages, and contains over England, Head of English at the Cathedral School, 25,000 entries; that is, it has fewer than a Bombay, organizer of courses for overseas students at quarter of the items covered by Gale's the University of Edinburgh, and associate professor I Al AD. If there were no demand for such of English at the Universitedu Quebec. He has zvrittenfor The Birmingham Mail, The Times of works of reference, publishers and compilers India, and The Scotsman. His publications include would not engage in the awful toil of the 'Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English,' producing them. There is a demand, how- 'A Foundation Course for Language Teachers,' ever, and as a result they stand as a testimony 'The Written Word', the co-editing o/'Languages to the success and significance of abbreviation of Scotland', and 'Worlds of Reference'. He is in English. married with three children.

36 ENGLISH TODAY 15 July 1988

The variable reference of everyday abbreviations: IRA to most Britons is only the Irish Republican Army, but Money to most Americans is primarily an individual retirement account. Glory Days for IR As

est wayj to deploy your previous contributions. This special report win help. If you're jusi getting around to opening an IRA for the 1985 tax yea/. shan* on you. You've already lost al toast 14 month* of ux- deferred compounding. So what, you say? Con- sider this sobering scenario: early birds who on Jan. I at each year contribute S2A00 tout IRA earning 10% will amass £42,000 more in tax- defened appreciation over 30 yean than pro- crasiinators who make the same investment but delay their contribution* until the last permiai- trie moment—the IM-filing deadline of April IJ in the following year. Don't despair too much, [hough. You've got plenty of company. Some 8O% of all IRA contributions for the 1984 tax year were made in the first 3S* months of 1985. Also, a sound investment choice now can help you make up for kwi lime. /n making such, a selection, whether for a 1985 or a 1986 IRA, you!) have tocontend thb year with a significantly altered economic envi- ronment. Key trail*: a booming slock market and the lowest interest rates seen sine* tRAi became universally available. And if (he ui re- form bid currently wending its way through Congress passes, yooTJ have to deal with some changes in the rides governing IRAs. Chief among them are slifler penalties for early wtih- •h— l5«.no«[hecorTcniin« •' •

THE CULT OF ABBREVIATION 37

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 25 Sep 2021 at 04:51:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400003515 phonically'; in the latter case, signs were formerly, using points was the norm. In the interpreted in terms only of the opening preface to the second EDOB, Paxton notes sounds of the words they stood for, and were that 'the modern practice of omitting from used in cartouches to represent people's abbreviations the full point (period) con- names. In doing this, they functioned as tinues to grow, and it is particularly true in proto-letters, before alphabets became com- military and data processing terms. The mon. Among the ancient Romans, the letters unpointed style, too, may be used for 'S.P.Q.R.' stood for Senatus Populusque advertising or for bold headings while the Romanus ('the Senate and the Roman pointed is kept for more formal use although people'), and clipped words like 'IMP CAES' increasingly officials are extremely doubtful for Imperator Caesar ('Emperor Caesar') were about what is the exact style of abbreviations common on inscriptions and coins. to be used by their organizations'. Present-day conventions of abbreviation, Idiosyncratic usage abounds. For example, however, have their origins in medieval people may or may not place points after each European scribal and scholastic practices. In of the initials of their names. The Inter- the Middle Ages, contractions were valued national Herald Tribune, for example, prints both for mnemonic purposes and because 'U.S.' for the United States alongside 'EC for parchment was expensive and copying labori- the European Community. There are even ous. As writing extended from Latin into the exceptions to the implicit convention that vernacular languages, abbreviation extended upper case is for language realia (such as with it, first of all as Latinisms (such as 'e.g.' 'BBC') and lower case for stylistic and other for exempli gratia), then as native contrac- devices (as with 'e.g.'). The Initial Teaching tions. From the 15th century onward, Alphabet (or initial teaching alphabet), for printers turned many scribal usages into example, reduces to 'i.t.a.', and the common typographic conventions, leaving others for short form of son of a bitch' is 's.o.b'. use in note-taking and record-keeping. It is also curious that a letter sequence The core purpose of all abbreviated usage, which is not an initialism can be interpreted ancient or modern, alphabetic or otherwise, is as one. Thus, the letters SOS were adopted as to combine economy of effort with repetition an international distress signal solely because of the familiar. The results, however, are far they were an easily transmitted sequence in from straightforward in a language like Morse code. Nonetheless, they are often English and lexicologists have come to use at taken to stand for 'save our souls'. least the following four categories to describe the kinds of items listed in the I Al AD and EDOB. 2 The acronym By accident or design, some initialisms can be 1 The initialism pronounced. If this is so, they usually are pronounced, as with NATO ('Nay-toe') and This fundamental category is script-based radar ('ray-dar'). Such forms are generally and unpronounceable as a word. It is known nowadays as acronyms, although they therefore spoken as letters. Initialisms have have also been called protograms. Their an indeterminate linguistic status; there is pronounceability makes them more like something unword-like in items that always words than other initialisms and parallels two have to be spelled out, yet they have the same tendencies in writing: textual autonomy as words and, like words, O Absence of points ('NATO' rather can take affixes (as in 'pro- and anti-BBC). than 'N.A.T.O.'), a practice that further Although there is a public consensus about strengthens an item's word status as well as pronouncing initialisms (except for such reinforcing the general inclination to remove items as 'an MP' or 'a MP', depending on points from all initialisms. whether the initialism is pronounced in full or O A shift to lower-case letters ('radar', not not), there is confusion about writing or 'RADAR'), because of increasing familiarity printing them, people dividing into those and use, with the result that on occasion an who use points, those who do not, and a acronym becomes so thoroughly a word that probable majority caught in the middle. its letter-based origin ceases to signify. This is a relatively recent state of affairs; Again, there are variations and idiosyn-

38 ENGLISH TODAY 15 July 1988

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 25 Sep 2021 at 04:51:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400003515 cratic practices. For example, in the list of ation'. In addition, clippings need not be abbreviations used for defining purposes in uniform throughout the English-using world. EDOB, a pointed 'U.N.O,' lies close to an 'Mathematics', for example, is typically unpointed 'UNESCO'. The British news- shortened in Britain to 'maths' and in North paper The Guardian treats acronyms like America to 'math'. proper nouns; it therefore prints the agency's Clippings are also capable of becoming name as 'Unesco'. Paxton does not, however, distinct words well removed from the acknowledge in the body of his dictionary meamngs and applications of their original either 'UNESCO' or 'Unesco'; there the longer forms. Such is the case with the fan in agency is 'U.N.E.S.C.O'. The editor of fan clubs (from 'fanatic') and the British EDOB is by no means alone in such nawy or general labourer (from a 19th- inconsistency. century use of 'navigator' to mean a digger of a Midland 'navigation' or canal). Fore-clipping is a minor activity. It also 3 The clipping occurs in names, as when 'Andrew' becomes A clipping is part of a word that serves for the 'Drew'. Around the turn of the century, a whole, either the first syllable (as with pro for fore-clipped word was often given a some- 'professional') or the last (as with phone for what self-conscious apostrophe, as with 'telephone'). The German lexicologist Hans 'phone. This usage is nowadays rare (perhaps Marchand (English Word-Formation, 1969) 'gator rather than gator for 'alligator'). has divided clippings logically but confus- It is usually only personal names that can ingly into back-clippings (in which the front be subject to both back- and fore-clipping, as survives: pro) and fore-clippings (in which the well as considerable adaptation. An out- back survives; phone). To avoid further standing example of this is 'Elizabeth', which confusion, I will stay with Marchand's terms. may become 'Eliza', 'Liz', and 'Lizzie', or Back-clipping is commoner and has a long 'Beth', 'Bess', and 'Betty'. pedigree, especially for shortening people's names. Such shortened names are subject to 4 The blend or portmanteau word adaptation and extension, so that 'William' can be either the straightforward 'Will' or the With this category, we move into a difficult adapted 'Bill'. These in turn can have area, because blends are not always diminutive suffixes added, to produce 'Willie' abbreviations as such, although they have and 'Billy', which can extend further to abbreviation-like features. Their purpose is such usages as 'willie' (a euphemism for more to form new words than to shorten 'penis') and 'billy' (a club or a male goat). existing ones. Consequently, they are usually Occasionally and mock-formally, the process seen as the fusion of one word with another to can work in reverse: someone in a British produce a third, as in Lewis Carroll's slithy restaurant might, for example, offer to pay (from 'slime' and 'lithe'), and chortle (from the william. 'chuckle' and 'snort'). Carroll called such The clipping of everyday words is attested coinages 'portmanteau words', because you as early as the 16th century: the obsolete coz could pack two ideas into one container. from 'cousin' in 1559 and the long-serving However, although blending is a word- gent for 'gentleman' in 1564. In the early 18th forming procedure, it is not the same as century, Jonathan Swift objected to the Latin derivation and compounding, in which the phrase mobile vulgus ('the fickle throng') creation of new material from pre-existing being reduced to 'mob' - one among many material follows relatively clearcut patterns. such novel contractions. We can see a rational process at work in the In contemporary English, the practice is creation of slithy and chortle, but it is far from firmly established, though often both selec- clearcut. tive and polysemic. It is selective where rev is In recent decades, however, blends have short for only one kind of 'revolution' covered the whole gamut from the Carrollian (extending to 'revving' and 'revved up'); it is portmanteau (brunch from 'breakfast' and polysemic where rev may be 'revolutions per 'lunch') to forms that shade into and create minute', 'revenue', and 'revision', or (capital- derivational patterns. Thus, electrocute ized) either 'Reverend' or 'Book of Revel- (coined around 1889) combines 'electro-' and

THE CULT OF ABBREVIATION 39

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 25 Sep 2021 at 04:51:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400003515 'execute' so effectively that it suggests a suffix under which Dupont will market the drug -cute, meaning 'to kill by means of. More naltrexone. There is a wholly unknown but strikingly, motorcade (c. 1913) combines enormous number of such creations in 'motor' in full with 'cavalcade', leading on to English today, with no supei-IAIAD to the nonce-like forms 'aerocade', 'aquacade', catalogue them. 'autocade', and 'camelcade'. In the OED Supplement (Vol. 1, 1972), Robert Burchfield labels -cade a suffix, but notes that it is Diverse and hybrid forms 'Taken by false division of CAVAL)CADE'. The four above categories conventionally However, yesterday's false division may describe lexical abbreviation, and each is a become tomorrow's conventional analogy. powerful and valuable tool for doing so. Above, I mentioned the case of 'Elizabeth' There is, however, even greater typological, as a word that can be clipped at either end. formational, and semantic diversity among Something similar can happen to lexical abbreviations than so far shown, as the material used in blending. Thus, the word following points demonstrate: 'economics' now provides us with both the O Some short forms are in limbo between econo- in 'econometrics' and the -nomics in initialism and acronym, as for example WHO 'Reaganonomics'. Comparable new forma- ('World Health Organization'), which for the tives recently active in the language include: sake of clarity is usually pronounced 'Double- -gate as in 'Irangate', -matic as in 'selec- You-Aitch-Oh' rather then 'Hoo'. Paxton tomatic', maxi- as in 'maxiskirt', mini- as in cites it as both 'WHO' and 'W.H.O.' 'miniboom', -thon as in 'telethon', and -tron as O Some are part-initialism, part-acronym, as in 'Robotron'. for example VTOL, a short form referring to On occasion, blend elements are printed as the characteristics of a certain kind of separate words, as contractions of the phrase aircraft. It is pronounced 'vee-tall', and 'high technology' graphically demonstrate. stands for 'vertical take-off and landing'. More commonly, these are hyphenated, as in O Some initialisms are most ingeniously 'Hi-Tech', 'high-tec', and even 'Highest- adapted into acronyms, as in: 'GLCMs Tech', but open variants range from 'Low (ground-launched cruise missiles) and Tech' and 'No Tech' to such facetious SLCMs (sea-launched cruise-missiles) are coinages as 'Lie Tech' and 'high tack'. 'Hi- called Glickems and Slickems by those in the Tech' is close to a new convention that know' (Time, 18 Feb 85). dispenses altogether with hyphens and uses O Most abbreviations can combine with capitals for visual impact, as with 'VisiTeP affixes to produce a diversity of additional and 'CompuSex'. All such practices - constructions. These are: prefixal adaptations hyphenation, separation, and internal capital- like ex-PoC (Amnesty International: someone ization - serve to highlight visually the side of who is no longer a prisoner of conscience) and blending which is more a matter of abbrevi- pro-JLP (in favour of the Jamaican Labour ation than word formation proper. Party); and suffixal adaptations like Rabisms The proliferation of blends and blend (the double-edged remarks for which the elements can be traced to several contempor- British politician R.A. Butler was famous) ary factors that affect many languages. Three and WASPier (more like a White Anglo- of these are the scientific need for compact Saxon Protestant than someone else). labels, the practical advantages of port- O Compounds containing abbreviations manteau telex names, and a liking for trendy abound, often becoming highly complex, as: usages in advertising, publicity, and the 'N.Y. kiddie porn', 'the TM-Sidhi pro- creation of brand names. Thus, science gramme', 'an AIDS-Africa link', and 'Metro- provides us with 'aldehyde' from alcohol Montreal QPF contingent patrols' (where dehydrogenatum and 'amatol' by contracting QPF stands for 'Quebec Police Force'). and combining ammonium nitrate and trinitro- O Multiple or compound abbreviations are toluene. Pharmaceutical companies have fol- possible and common, like Mr. TV Exec lowed science in the creation of innumerable (addressing a man who is a television new blends and quasi-blends, such as executive), IBM PC ('a personal computer 'Mentadent', a toothpaste flavoured with made by International Business Machines') menthol, and 'Trexan', the name and NYS ESOL BEA ('New York State,

40 ENGLISH TODAY 15 July 1988

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 25 Sep 2021 at 04:51:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400003515 English to Speakers of Other Languages, than distinct containers. My preference is the Bilingual Educators Association'). latter, because it accounts realistically for the O Some traditional learned compounds do clearcut and fuzzy aspects of the data. not retain all the material from their source A model of this kind is particularly useful words, as with fathometer, which compacts for handling a subspecies that I would like to 'fathom' and 'meter', and symbology, which call the syllabic acronym. It lies between runs 'symbol' and '-ology' together to save a acronym and blend, and is currently produc- syllable. tive worldwide, and in other languages O In addition to institutional and stylistic besides English. abbreviations, there are many usages serving nonce or facetious purposes, such as: BMOC The syllabic acronym for 'Big Man on Campus'; BOGSAT for 'A bunch of guys sitting at a table'; GOMER Where a classic acronym draws only on the for 'Get Out of My Emergency Room'; first letters of several words, the syllabic MMBA for 'Miles and Miles of Bloody acronym draws on the first syllables. Typical Africa'; and TGIF, meaning 'Thank God two-syllable and three-syllable patterns are: it's Friday'. Alsama Alberta, Saskatchewan Canada O Similarly, standard usages with official and Manitoba interpretations can be assigned facetious and Amoco American Oil Company USA ironic additional interpretations: KKK, Asda Associated Dairies UK 'Koestler's Kultur Kongress'; ARIBA Con Ed Consolidated Edison US ('Association of the Royal Institute of Fedeco Federal Electoral Architects'), 'Always remember I'm a bloody Commission Nigeria architect'; and such British honours as CMG Hojo Howard Johnson ('Commander of St Michael and St George'). (Motor Lodges) US KCMG ('Knight Commander of St Michael op-ed opposite the editorial journalese and St George') and GCMG (Grand Com- At least two international factors currently mander of St Michael and St George') which encourage the spread of syllabic acronyms. are also glossed as 'Call Me God', 'Kindly Firstly, the same processes favour these Call Me God', and 'God Calls Me God'. forms as favour abbreviation generally: This list by no means exhausts the actual or scientific and commercial labelling, computer potential in the language. The coinages of usage, revamped telex-style names of busi- every passing day include UFOports in space, nesses, and the creation of snappy brand OD-ing on drugs, being mirved by a super- names. However, all of these tie in with a power, engaging in flexercise and sexercise, powerful factor from outside English and the dancerobics and docudramas, talking circle of alphabetic languages: the growing to Australaskan gastronauts about Easter influence of Japanese. This language, both eggonomics, eating Tuna-roni at Snaxpo phonetically and in its scripts, promotes such while reading about Speedimpex in syllabic usage; from the Japanese point of Enginews, before moving on to a beautique view, Amoco and Texaco are formed in the for faddicts of insta-fash. same comfortable matrix as Toshiba and Tokyo. A continuum model of abbreviation Both traditions come together in such Japanese brand names as Mavica, which is The existence of such formations indicates formed from the first syllables of the phrase that, however valuable the listing of tra- 'magnetic video camera'. The following ditional categories has been to date, we need a extracts from Time provide a global context more flexible and accommodating model, for such abbreviations: both for its own sake and because (as the Gale O 'The Japanese long ago mastered the publicists pointed out) abbrevomania is in the process of labeling their consumer goods to air. Such a model comes in either of two appeal to a global market. Walkman may be a forms: the traditional categories plus an piece of fractured English, but the term has indefinite range of hybrids among and around become as generic and widely recognized as them, or a continuum, in which the Xerox or Coke. . . . The Japanese are traditional categories are focal areas rather 'certainly in the forefront' of the naming

THE CULT OF ABBREVIATION 41

The unpronounceable initialism flowsint o the pronounceable acronym, which might in turn be meaningless, accidentally meaningful, or deliberately contrived - as demonstrated by the following real-life specimens:

Unpronounceable American Automobile Association AAA Forest Products Research Laboratory FPRL Ku Klux Klan KKK

Semi-pronounceable British Broadcasting Corporation BBC ('Beeb') Cambridge College of Arts and Technology CCAT ('See-cat') National Economic Development Council NEDC ('Neddy')

Pronounceable but meaningless Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow EPCOT, Epcot National and Local Government Officers' Association NALGO, Nalgo Roll-on, roll-off (ferries) RO-RO, ro-ro

Accidentally or mnemonically mimicking an existing wore/ Grenada United Labour Party GULP Programme for European traffic with highest efficiency and unprecedented safety PROMETHEUS Strategic Arms Limitations Talks SALT Superconducting quantum interference device SQUID

'Slogan acronyms', deliberately coined for effect Disposal of Unused Medicine and Pills DUMP Men Allied to Combat Hypocrisy and Oppression MACHO National Organization for Women NOW People Organized and Working for Economic Rebirth POWER

game, says Dick Taylor, American Motors' ants' freely depart from the classical orth- manager of marketing planning. 'I like the ographies of the West in order to come up name [of Nissan's] Sentra. It's in the middle with the right 'quality image'. The result is of their line, like a sentry standing guard. A Sentra rather then 'Centra' and Acura rather quality image' ('The Japanese naming game', than 'Accura'. Akura might accord better 13 Jan 86). with Japanese romaji script, but would move O 'Siegel & Gale, another New York too far from the upmarket effect of a Latin company, persuaded United States Steel to 'c'. Among the name-makers' resources is the transform itself into USX. San Francisco- generation of word forms by computer. Given based NameLab christened Nissan's Sentra enough of the bits and pieces of language and car and Honda's luxury Acura model'. ('The rules for infinite re-combination, almost Pros Who Play the Name Game', 3 Nov 86). anything is possible. George Orwell might These extracts provide further examples of have had doubts about such a future for the contemporary abbreviation at work. They language, but James Joyce would probably also indicate that 'corporate-identity consult- have approved. /ED

42 ENGLISH TODAY 15 July 1988