Short takes: INITIALISM

[Victor Steinbok]

Two quick comments. My first comment about initialisms was too clever by
half. It was meant as a joke--of course initialisms of all sorts go much
further back than the OED citations! I was simply setting up the piece,
focusing on antedating the OED definition. For this reason I will forgo
any comments on the actual initialism, as opposed to the origin of the
term itself. This should not prevent others looking into the issue on
this thread.

Second, note the iterative comment in the 1899 citation--Thomas is cited
as referring to his own "Handbook", which, of course, is the 1868
volume. It is simply baffling that the OED1 editors would cite that
sentence without so much as considering taking a look at the original
source of the purported coinage. Or else, they never made the
connection, which is stranger still because citations to the Handbook
are rampant in language-related literature at least through the 1890s
and would have been readily available to the editors. This leaves the
possibility that the omission was deliberate and that makes me wonder why.

     VS-)

On 3/31/2010 10:17 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> At 6:01 AM -0400 3/31/10, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>
>> As the discussion about txting progressed, I began wondering about the
>> use of acronyms and initialisms /as nomenclature/. OED gives Feb 1943
>> issue of American Notes&  Queries as the earliest source, Wiki pins the
>> Bell Labs as coining the term in the same year--sounds plausible, but
>> not definitive.
>>
>> But initialisms go back further. OED cites back to 1899.
>>
> Not counting "O.K." and other jocular abbreviations from that period,
> as documented in detail by Allen Walker Read, I assume.  Possibly
> O.K. is the only one from those years to have survived (as opposed to
> e.g. "K.Y." for 'know yuse', i.e. 'no use', and others of that kind),
> but one of my favorites (as posted here a few years back) is "b4" for
> 'before'.
>
> LH
>
> ...
>> *1899* R. THOMAS in /N. & Q/. 9th Ser. III. 103/1 In my 'Handbook' I
>> give an initialism of Mr. Watts's, 'P. P. C. R.'

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