acronyms and abbreviations

[cellio]

Dani and I had an interesting conversation about abbreviations and acronyms (pronouncable abbreviations) tonight, prompted by the assertion that the location of a web page is a "u-r-l", not an "url" (rhymes with a man's name). We both consider that obvious, but we both know people who think it's "url". A similar case applies to "s-c-a" (not "sca"), the historical organization we belong to.

So, I asked, what characterizes an acronym? I'm not sure; Dani's take is that an acronym has to "sound like a word" (in English, in our case). (But "url" does, so it's not just that -- but I didn't drill into that.) What does "sounds like a word" mean? I guess it's a comfortable sequence of phonemes, the sort of utterance that would make you say "I don't know what that word means" as opposed to "have you been drinking?". NASA, NARAL, and UNICEF are examples of this. We tried to think of three-letter acronyms; neither of us were sure whether NOW is usually "n-o-w" or "now". (I've heard both and neither makes me twitch.)

I opined that the longer an abbreviation is, the more incentive there is to pronounce it if you can No one wants to say "n-a-s-a" if "nasa" will do; the former is too many syllables. ("I-e-e-e" is cumbersome in a different way, hence "i-triple-e".) With a three-letter abbreviation the cost of spelling it out isn't so high, though Dani thinks there are fewer of them that are going to sound like words. "Ibm" would never be mistaken for a word in the English language; "doj" (sounds like "dodge") would be but we say "d-o-j". So I'm not sure what's going on with three-letter cases.

There was an amusing bit of dialogue:

Me: S-O-S.
Dani: Yeah, but that's interesting because it is a sequence of letters in Morse Code.
Me: That was the first of the two applications of that abbreviation I had in mind.
Dani: (pause) Ok, but you're one of only ten people who remembers Son Of Stopgap.
Me: There've got to be at least 50. :-)
Dani: Stopgap, on the other hand...

And yes, I pronounce it "s-o-s" either way; while "sos" doesn't sound unreasonable as a word, it feels completely wrong as a pronounced reference to an early text editor. (Which, by the way, I suspect is remembered by thousands of people.)

Addendum: Combined forms. "H-vac", not "h-v-a-c", but "b-a-t-f", not "bat-f".

Comments

[gregbo.livejournal.com]

Some people I knew at Digital's research labs pronounced the acronyms as single-syllable sounds. For example, Cambridge Research Lab was CRL (curl), Western Research Lab was WRL (wurl). As you might expect, URL was pronounced url.

[cellio]

DECWRL was "dec-wurl" to me too, but it didn't transfer to "url". I don't think CRL ever appeared on my horizon.

Another random data point: I spelled out LLL-CRG, even though one could, in principle, pronounce CRG as "curg".

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

I went to Case Western Reserve University, which during my tenure was known as CWRU. (The official short form is now "Case", which I expect has alumni of the former Western Reserve University a bit cranky). We usually pronounced this as "crew", especially in compound forms (e.g. the campus network, CWRUnet, was pronounced CREW-net).