h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

According to Will Self, on shooting stars no less, an acronym has to spell another word. otherwise its just initials. so ner.

As well as ETLA, you should mention the SA (Short Acronym), such as "PC", "IO" and "UI"...

OF course, the best recursive one that I know is a company name.
CYGNUS - Cygnus, Your GNU Support, or fully and illogically expanded:
Cygnus your GNU's Not Unix not unix Support your GNU's not unix Not Unix Support.

Well, Will Self's wrong then. Acronyms often spell out another word, but don't have to, unless there are such things as unescos, etc. And I found 'The Quantity Theory of Insanity' a bit disappointing.

Yup, Will's confused. "RADAR" became a word by virtue of having been an acronym first.

It depends. As far as I understand it has to make a pronounceable word - but that doesn't mean a real word. SNAFU is easily pronounced, but not a real word.

im more inclined to trust him. cos he is certifiably clever. the rest of you? well, im not so sure. and great apes was good.

If he's so clever how come he's making his living touring Shooting Stars, Room 101 and Have I Got News For You?

Wait...money for doing practically nothing...ee gads! What a very smart man!

Will Self - Certifiably clever? Yes. Infallible? No. But I agree that acronyms have to be pronounceable - this may be what Will was on about anyway.

there we go. a clever man, who is also right! ha! um...

id loveto make my living doing bbc2 gameshows, to be brutally frank...

Currently having an exchange of emails with the people at the OED about whether an acronym must be pronounceable. As far as I can see, a word which is not pronounceable is not a word. Chambers says pronounceable, OED don't - I think Chambers have the right of it.

...and the headline said "Summit pronounced success", so he threw himself under a bus."

?

if all pronounceable abreaveations are acronyms, is CIA an acronym? I suppose it could be pronounced sy-a

CIA an acronym?

No. Common usage is one of the crteria. I you started talking about the Cy-a, nobody would have an idea what you were saying.

Pronouncability and common usage determine an achronym.


Stuart

Yup. If newsreaders started referring to the IRA as "Ira" (as in "Ira Gershwin") nobody would have a clue what they were talking about.

Exactly.

Interestingly though, the Provisional IRA were often refered to as Pira and most people understood that, at least in military circles.


Stuart

I was always taught that the proper term for a non-pronounceable acronym was an "initialism"...it seems like a useful distinction.

hmm, here we go again with "proper" - OK, so some people call non-pronouncable acronyms "initialisms", but given that most (or at the very least, many) people use "acronym" to cover both types (and those that fall somewhere between), who's to say they are "wrong"?

Or, to put it more politely - "some people define an acronym as only those abbreviations of this type that are pronouncable, and call unpronouncable ones 'initialisms'; however, this is not universally accepted, and some group all similar abbreviations together under the umbrella 'acronym'. This latter approach also facilitates the categorisation of words that are pronounced as a mixture of letters and syllables."

Just my of course...

The initials "IRA" caused some small astrife when a big American fast food company opened up its British operation.

Being cheapskates, they thought buying specifically British payroll stationery was un-necessary and reasoned that if a British employee read "$85" on their payslip while seeing "£85" in actual cash, they'd soon get the idea to read "£" for "$".

However, what undid the cheapskate Yanks was the line on the payslip that read


"IRA Deduction"


Now to an American, "IRA" stands for "Individual Retirement Account", and this would read as something like "employee's pension contribution" were the payslips to have been written in British English.

But to British employees, the letters IRA mean something else entirely.

ASo the rumour blew up that these were a bunch of unscrupulous Irish-Americans taxing British workers to fund Irish terrorism (Note to Americans: we Brits believe as an article of faith that ALL Irish-Americans hate us and happily contribute lots of dollars to Irish terrorism)

Denial on the part of the company conceerned only served to fan the flames,(we all know that official denial means they have something to hide) and all this because they were too cheap to get the correct payroll stationery....