numerical acronym

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:04 PM -0500 11/5/04, Alice Faber wrote:
>--On Friday, November 5, 2004 4:48 PM -0600 "Mullins, Bill"
><Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL> wrote:
>
>>  Is there a special word for an acronym or other construct that is partly
>>formed by a numerical digit(s)?
>>
>>K-9
>>P2P (peer-to-peer)
>>many vanity license plates
>>"b4" for "before"
>
>I don't know if this is "official" terminology, but aren't these a kind of
>rebus spelling?

I've always thought of official rebuses as involving pictures too.
The former kind I think of as alphanumeric, but I don't know the
specific term.   As Allen Walker Read relates (see Chapters 10-15 of
his collected lexicography in PADS 86), there was a craze for what
were then called "laconics" in the 1830s and 1840s, including (but
not limited to) the "b4" above, as illustrated by this anonymous poem
reprinted in 1832 entitled "To Miss Catherine Jay, of Utica":

Oh KTJ is far B4
All other maids IC;
Her XLNC I adore
As a lovely NTT.

As I've suggested here before, the popularity of such "cabalistic"
readings in the "O.K." (< "oll korrect") era was evidently not
hindered by the fact that communication back then was either by
newspapers or F2F, with very little texting or IMing in evidence.  In
any case, the "B4" in the above poem is the only alphanumeric laconic
I've come across in Read's citations or the MoA databases for the
antebellum era.  I'd be very interested if anyone else could find
others from that period.

Larry