Blogging my hatred
Here’s another one: I hate how everybody’s afraid to use the word ‘anagram’ for fear of some illiterate fool not understanding what they’re on about. ‘Mix up the letters’ is such an ugly phrase.
posted at 16:18
7 Comments:
I always get anagram confused with the word for when words spell out works when you only use their first letters to kind of abbreviate the thing. Like how the United States of America is shortened to the word USA, so you can say USA, like ooo-sa, instead of saying the whoe United States of America.
I forget what that's called, but I wish it didn't sound so much like anagram, because when I say something about anagram, people are all like, "What the hell are you talking about?" which is somewhat like what you're describing, but not really.
Just so everyone knows and doesn't think I'm stupid, because despite popular opinion, I care what people on the internet think of me. When I used the word "works" in the first sentence of my last comment, what I actually meant to say, and this is rather humorous given the nature of things, "what nature?" you might implore, I don't know but if you shut your trap I can finish, is the word "words."
I believe you mean an acronym. Technically I believe these have to be a set of initials which spell out an actual word (such as ‘SWAT’), but I’m not absolutely certain about that. What I am certain of is that an acronym has to be pronouncable as a word, so things like ‘NHS’ don’t really count; a lot of people use the word in that sense, but pedants like myself prefer to use ‘initialism’ to avoid confusion. Of course, this means that ‘TLA’ is not a three-letter acronym, but it remains a three-letter abbreviation, so all is well in the world.
When I'm not wasting time on forums etc (which is not often), I actually run a website devoted to acronyms (sad but true) and it annoys me when people keep calling them anagrams.
I have heard the acronym vs. acrostic/initialism distinction and I vaguely recall looking the words up in a few dozen dictionaries, but I can't remember the results of my study.
Something that annoys me about initialisms, or whatever they should be called, is that people pronounce them even when they're only abbreviations in writing... 'www' takes so much more time to say than 'world wide web'. And then people write spoken abbreviations such as 'Meg' when 'MB' is shorter.
And now, as a treat for those of you who read through that blether, an extract from 'Last Chance to See' by Douglas Adams:
For much of the time we were tramping through wet fields of sago, and a foolish but happy thought suddenly occurred to me. We were walking through the only known anagram of my name - which is Sago Mud Salad. I speculated footlingly as to what possible cosmic significance there could be to this and by the time I had finally dismissed the thought, the light was fading and we had arrived at the hut, which was a fairly spartan wooden building, but new and quite well built.
Eighty Jamesville fundollars for you.
People are idiots. I remember being irritated by folks using "ABC order" instead of the word "alphabetical" when I was, oh, six.
-Yanichka,
an Internet person
who is not a member of blogger.
If they did that to me I would have punched them in the crotch. My reduced height would have facilitated my aim.
So, Internet person, how did you happen upon this absolute hole of a website? Chance, or an unfortunate sequence of links?
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