FCCU!

Heidi Harley of HeiDeas has piqued my interest in acronyms again. Poking around on her website, I found this paper about acronyms. (Q-Pheevr of A Roguish Chrestomathy found it, too, last August, and blogged about it here.) In this paper, Harley tries to answer the question of why, for example, why the Central Intelligence Agency is referred to as the CIA (not as just *CIA), while the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is referred to as NASA (never *the NASA). She finds a pattern based on whether the acronym is pronounced like an ordinary word (e.g., NASA), or spelled out (e.g., CIA). She reserves the term acronym for the former, and abbreviation for the latter, and shows that acronyms formed from names beginning with the just about always lose it, as in the NASA/*the NASA example. On the other hand, abbreviations formed from names beginning with the usually keep it (though the pattern is not as strong as that seen for acronyms).

A few days after I’d read the paper, a couple of exceptions occurred to me. First of all, there’s the O.C.. For the longest time after the show of the same name starting running, I didn’t know what the abbreviation stood for, but eventually I figured out that it stood for Orange County. Even then, though, I was uneasy about my conclusion. The fully pronounced name was Orange County, not *the Orange County, so how did the the get into the abbreviation? (I guess this isn’t an exception to Harley’s claim after all, now that I think about it: She addresses only the names that actually do start with the, and what happens to it when the name is abbreviated.)

The second exception came from my dad’s stories from his days at a Gulf Coast refinery before I was born. One of the buildings there housed the fluidized catalytic cracking unit, or FCCU. FCCU wasn’t an abbreviation; it was definitely a true acronym, that Dad and his buddies had lots of fun pronouncing. And, contrary to Harley’s generalization, it kept the the. They referred to this piece of equipment as the FCCU. And when another one was installed, they called it the FCCU 2!

Double Portmanteaus and Stacked Acronyms

Justin Busch at Semantic Compositions discusses the newly coined word vog, which refers to a kind of smog currently being pumped out by Mt. Saint Helens. Vog is an example of what’s sometimes called a portmanteau word, in which parts of two words, in this case volcano and smog, are blended to create a new one. But wait a minute! Busch quite reasonably objects. Smog itself is a portmanteau word, formed from smoke and fog. When you amputate the sm-, you’re not just shortening the word, you’re losing essential information about its meaning! Or, as he puts it,

[It] raises the question of how many times you can iterate this sort of process before the derivation becomes hopelessly opaque.

His friend Radagast, however, makes a good point in a comment:

[C]oining the … word vog allows residents/ volcanologists of the region to specifically describe a condition familiar to them in a single, short word that they can all understand.
And does it really matter if the derivation is “hopelessly opaque,” as long as people know what you mean when you say the word?

In other words, who ever said that the derivation of a word had to be transparent? That smog can be truncated this way and become part of a double portmanteau (as one commentator was inspired to call it) just goes to show that smog has been around long enough to be accepted as an ordinary word without any special status attached to its internal structure.

I guess Busch’s and my problem (if I may presume to read his mind) is that we can’t let go of the past. For us, sm- still stands for smoke, -og still stands for fog, and smog can only retain its meaning when both those elements are present. In other words, smog is more like a phrase than a word: Just as I like traffic cannot mean the same thing as I like traffic lights, so -og cannot mean the same thing as smog.

This is reminding me of something. Oh, yes! Those stacked acronyms I talked about a while back, the main example being ACT-UP, where the A stands for AIDS. Here’s a more recently collected example:

LIGO = Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory

But laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, so what does the L in LIGO really stand for? (And incidentally, why does wave get left out in the cold?) Another example:

DELPH-IN = Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG Initiative

But HPSG is an acronym for Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. So does the H stand for HPSG, or for head-driven-phrase-structure-grammar?

The problem again is that I’m thinking of acronyms as more like phrases than words. Take away part of a phrase and you have a different meaning; therefore, I want to say, take away part of an acronym, and you have a different meaning. Take -aser away from laser, or PSG from HPSG, and the remaining l- and H- don’t mean “laser” and “HPSG,” but just “light” and “head.” And come to think of it, I am getting a little light-headed from thinking about all this. I’ve just gotta let go of the past, and set the acronyms free, free to achieve their destiny as words.

Acronym Stacking

In my posting on almost-recursive acronyms, I noted that the company Cygnus, whose name expands to “Cygnus, Your GNU Support,” was not guilty of what I referred to as acronym stacking. This is the name I give to an acronym including a letter that abbreviates a different acronym; as I like to think of it, the first acronym is stacked on top of the second one. The first stacked acronym to catch my attention was the name of an issue-oriented political group called ACT-UP, an acronym for “AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.” Aside from the awkwardness of the phrase unleash power for the sake of having a meaningful acronym, my complaint was that you couldn’t tell what the A stood for. Yes, it stood for AIDS, but the A in AIDS stands for acquired. Shouldn’t this group more properly be known as AIDSCT-UP?
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Almost-Recursive Acronyms

There’ve been a number of posts about acronyms recently on some of the blogs I read. One was from me, one from Glen, and one from the guy at Semantic Compositions. This last one reminded me of a letter to the editor I wrote some 15 years ago. The post is about recursive acronyms, the cited example being GNU, which expands to “GNU’s not Unix.” One of the letters in a recursive acronym (theoretically any one of them, but always the first one in the examples I’ve seen) stands for the acronym itself, leading to an infinite loop when one tries to expand out the acronym. As I read the post, I thought back to my freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin… ah, yes… I remember it as if it were a segment on Letterman…
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Machine Machines and Number Numbers

I wonder what you’d call a machine whose function was to make automatic teller machines (ATMs). Would it be called an ATM machine? Well, no, of course not, since ATM machine means the same thing as plain old ATM: If you see a sign saying “ATM machine inside” when you enter a grocery store, you will find an ordinary ATM, and you won’t find some other kind of machine that has something to do with ATMs.

This kind of redundancy also occurs with acronyms whose final N stands for number.
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