TIPS

[Jonathan Lighter]

The Wiki article on "Backronym" appears to list even more:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Backronym

  The accompanying discussion page is also interesting.  First time I've seen "apronym."

  JL

"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: TIPS
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On Jul 3, 2006, at 10:56 AM, Dave Wilton wrote:

> And I addressed most of these in "Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic
> Urban
> Legends."

the scorecare:

7 of 8 of the Wikipedia items (missing: git)
2 of 6 of the ones i supplied (missing: crud, gomer, hep, daemon)
0 of the 6 Larry Horn supplied (missing: camp. cop, grunt. pimp,
snob, wop)
0 of the 3 Jon Lighter supplied (missing: swag, pog(ue), pingers)

everyone (Wikipedia, Quinion, Wilton) seems to be pretty much agreed
on the (roughly 7) central items.

but dave also has five new ones: ichthys, cabal, spud, nylon, SOS.

and AWOL, where no one seems to doubt an acronymic source, but
there's some uncertainty about when and where it arose.

in any case, nice to have the backronyms together in a chapter.

arnold

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