FAQ (was Re: TIPS)

[Mark A. Mandel]

I asked
> Shouldn't we have an FAQ? No, I'm not volunteering to compile it.

Ben Zimmer quipped:
    >>>>>
Well, the first question in the FAQ obviously should be:

Should it be "Shouldn't we have an FAQ?" or "Shouldn't we have a FAQ?"?

 <<<<<

Yeah (sigh). I normally say /faek/, but my speech recognition software is
most likely to understand that as "fact". But it recognizes /'ef'ey'kyuw/ as
"FAQ" without difficulty. -- That doesn't address what I had to do to get
those phonemic representations in here, but I've already set up macros for
that.

Do we have a term for expressions like this? That is, abbreviations formed
from initial letters and observed in the wild with both types of
pronunciation: acronymic and initialistic. The only other one I know of
offhand is ASAP, which I have heard pronounced /'ey,saep/ as well as
/'ey'es'ey'piy/.

Grant Barrett says:

    >>>>>

Last time we tried to make one it turned out almost nobody volunteered to
compile it. In the stead of an ADS FAQ, I offer the following list. Nine out
of ten language questions from the public can be answered by these pages.

 <<<<<

How about putting that list at the head of the "links" page? Or give it a
page of its own, called FAQ, and headed with a version of the above
paragraph.

-- Mark A. Mandel
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]

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