acronyms versus abbreviations

James Landau jjjrlandau at EARTHLINK.NET
Tue Feb 28 01:10:31 UTC 2006


A note to Mark Mandel---yes, "W(h)ales" was to shoehorn the song into the
topic.  You may have seen the song before; it was published in the filksong
book for the 1977 Boskone (which is how it got copyrighted).  .

Now to get back onto the original topic.  The man who told me the George of
Saxony story (no, it was not original with me) in college (68-69 school
year) had a high-school friend named Phyllis K. Goodson.  (Yes, I have met
her)  Everybody called her "Package" because her initials were "PKG",
thereby providing another example of an acronym-relative that requires the
addition of vowels.

Package and her friends Shirley and Mercy were all chasing the same boy in
the high school choir they all belonged to.  The choir's musical comment
was to sing "Shirley Goodson and Mercy shall follow me..."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list