Letter Perfect

[Dave Monroe]

>From Geoffrey Nunberg, "Letter Perfect," Going
Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in
Confrontational Times (New York: Public Affairs,
2004), pp. 251-4 ...

"TLAM's and RPG's, MRE's and SSE's, EPW's and WMDs.
The language we were hearing from the Iraq war had a
decidedly alphabetic ring. But then that's only
appropriate. The word 'acronym' itself was first used
exactly forty years ago to describe military coinings
like WAC, ANZAC, and radar, all drawn from the
initials of longer phrases. By then, the process was
familiar enough so that servicemen could make fun of
it with the term snafu, for 'situation normal, all
fucked up.' (Snafu was so successful that it gave rise
to other phrases like fubb, for 'fucked up beyond
belief,' and cummfu for 'complete utter monumental
military fuck-up.' But none of these had legs except
fubar, 'fucked up beyond recognition,' which under the
spelling foobar has survived as programmer's slang,
though used now as a generic file name or command.)
   "Of course the American fondness for acronyms and
abbreviations began well before World War II. After
all, ours was the first modern nation to be known by
its initials. Nineteenth-century Americans gave the
language items like C.O.D., S.O.B., and P.D.Q., not to
mention O.K. -- certainly the most successful American
contribution to the languages of the world. even if it
has been unclear for most of its history what the
letters originally stood for. 
   "But it wasn't until the mid-twentieth century that
acronyms became the linguistic wallpaper of modern
life...." (pp. 251-2)

"... the crucial thing about these expressions is the
way they come to live lives of their own as separate
words." (p. 252)

   "It's astonishing how pervasive these coinings have
become over the past sixty years. I'm not thinking
just of the ones that come from bureaucracy and
technology....
   "But by now acronyms are piled up in every room in
the American house.... you could sketch the social
history of the postwar period just by listing the
initials it has carved on the walls.
   "Items like these don't have much to do with a
propensity for conciseness--in fact most of them
barely save any syllables over their spelled-out
equivalents. The urge to acronymize goes deeper than
that. It's as if we're moving towards a purely
analytic language, where the shape of every word
reveals its meaning to the initiates who possesses the
secret key....
   "In that sense, acronyms are the slang of a textual
world. There's a mysterious sense of destiny to these
names. The cabalists used the process called notarikon
to form new names for God by combining the first or
last letters of the words from phrases or biblical
verses. And the Tudors studded their verses with
acronyms and acrostics--though probably not nearly as
many as scholars have claimed to find in their efforts
to prove that Shakespeare's works were written by
someone else. 
   "That's the same impulse that leads people to rig
the game--they start with a plausible acronym and then
contrive a description to fit it. As best I can tell,
the first of these was WAVES, the name the Navy coined
in 1942 for 'Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency
Service,' a description that managed to be
simultaneously condescending and inaccurate. And in
later years the same process has given us
organizational names like CARE, NOW, and MADD.
  "No one is more adept at this game than legislators.
Over the past few years we've had the RAVE Act, for
'Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy,' and
operation TIPS, the Terrorism Information and
Prevention System. And then there's the antiterrorism
act that goes by the name of 'Uniting and
Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools
Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.' That
acronymizes as USA PATRIOT--a happy accident indeed."
(pp. 253-4)

http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/publicaffairsbooks-cgi-bin/display?book=1586482343

See also ...

Letter Perfect

Geoff Nunberg

"Fresh Air" commentary, June 3, 2003

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/acronyms.html

And my personal favorite ...

Supreme Headquarters International Espionage
Law-Enforcement Division

http://www.toonopedia.com/shield.htm

http://www.hmss.com/otherspies/shield/

http://www.marveldirectory.com/teams/shield.htm

http://home.gate.net/~nickfury/shield/shieldmain.html


	
		
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