"slang" and "informal" as dict labels [WAS: shirty?]

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:32 AM -0800 2/17/03, Kim & Rima McKinzey wrote:
>>BTW, most of us who read science fiction prefer the abbreviation
>>"sf"/"SF". Many of us, though by no means all, dislike or even detest
>>the expression "sci-fi".
>
>It's similar to the dislike of Frisco for San Francisco.  But I admit
>I never understood the detestation for either that or "sci-fi".
>
The obvious generalization is that "SF" is such an elegant
initialism, everyone wants to use it and therefore skips through the
intermediate inelegant truncations to get there.

Larry

P.S.  I know, nobody actually *says* "Ess-Eff" for the city, as
opposed to "Ell-Ay".  Anyway, whatever the original factors really
were, at this point we're talking shibboleths in both cases, so the
reason for the respective aficionados to avoid "sci-fi" and "Frisco"
is that others do; it's a nice coding device.  Evidently it hasn't
stopped anyone from accepting Otis Redding's reference to "the Frisco
Bay", but he had metrical considerations operating.