More from the NYT

[Jonathan Lighter]

Sounds like time for an acroretronym of "Gotcha."

"Government of Tampa, City Housing Authority"?

(Remember that retroacronyms are often extraordinarily lame: somehow it
makes them more believable.)

JL

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 10:49 AM, Ben Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: More from the NYT
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 9:23 AM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 10:10 AM, Martin Kaminer wrote:
> > >
> > > I was surprised to see in today's article entitled "Alone in Public
> > > Housing, With a Spare Bedroom"
> > >
> > >
> > >
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/nyregion/housing-authority-also-has-an-undercrowding-problem.html
> > > that New York City Housing Authority was spelled 'Nycha' rather than
> > > in all caps.  All local policy wonks (and one imagines facility
> > > residents) refer to it as /Nai-tS^/ but seeing it in print converted
> > > from an acronym to a word seemed a bit jarring.  I don't think one can
> > > do case-sensitive searches on the NYT archives but from my cursory
> > > perusal this seems to be a first.
> >
> > The NYTimes favors "NYCHA" but also uses "N.Y.C.H.A" and "Nycha".
> >
> > "Nycha" was used in three of 55 uses in the past 12 months.
>
> "Nycha" is an artifact of the New York Times Style Guide, which
> dictates that "acronyms of five or more letters are
> upper-and-lowercased: _Unicef_; _Unesco_; _Alcoa_; _Awacs_."
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=CnwIVkAQgFwC&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4
>
> --bgz
>
> --
> Ben Zimmer
> http://benzimmer.com/
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



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