[Ads-l] A bacronym named Steve

[James A. Landau]

On Wed, 21 Mar 2018 11:19:08 Zone - 0400 Mark Mandel <mark.a.mandel at GMAIL.COM> wrote

<quote>A related question: How old is the backronym itself? The earliest 
example
in Nancy Friedman's article
<https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/candlepwr/back-to-backronyms/> is 
Ian
Fleming's fictional SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counterintelligence,
Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion), from 1961. Virginia Apgar developed
what would become known as the Apgar Score between 1949 and 1952, but 
the
backronym also dates only to 1961.¹

The oldest backronym I'm familiar with is CARE, founded in 1945 as
"Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe" and redefined three 
times since then.² Are there any older than that? <end quote>

Acronyms are an old Jewish tradition.  Backronyms may have followed.

One possible backronym  is the prayer "Ein Ke-Elohenu" which is mentioned in a ninth-century prayerbook of Amran Gaon.  The order of the stanzas has changed since them, leaving a puzzle.  In the present version, the first stanza begins "There is none like our God" and the second stanze begins "Who is like unto our God?", that is, the question is answered before it is posed.  It has been suggested that the order of the stanzas has been changed so that the first three form the acrostic "AMEN".  (The next two expand the acrostic to read "Amen, Blesse be Thou".)  That is, the hymn was rearraged to form a backronym.

Source: _Encyclopedia Judaica_ Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1971, no ISBN, volume 6 page 534 column 2.

- Jim Landau




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