ob-gyn revisited

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Mar 30, 2012, at 8:45 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:

> At HUP (acronym, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania), the Medical
> Intensive Care Unit and the Surgical Intensive Care Unit are known by their
> acronyms, pronounced /'m=C9=AAkju:/ and /'s=C9=AAkju:/... the latter being
> particularly infelicitous, to my mind, especially when my wife was spending
> a lot of time there.

the characters display for me as encodings, so i'm not entirely sure what pronunciation you're reporting here, but i'm guessing they could be represented as "mick-you" and "sick-you".  is that right?

and is HUP actually treated as an acronym, with the pronunciation /h at p/ or /hUp/ or /hu:p/ (or /hyu:p/), or is it treated as an initialism, pronounced as sequence of three letter names?

arnold

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