[Ads-l] A bacronym named Steve

[Ben Zimmer]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 8:39 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> Or should that be STEVE?
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/science/steve-canada-auro
> ra-borealis.html
>
> Start with the beautiful photo of the "aurora borealis-like phenomenon”
> over Manitoba and the caption stating
> "It has been given the name Steve, for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity
> Enhancement"
>
> …and then read the article, where you'll see that the caption in fact is
> highly misleading.
>
> Interesting that the piece barely defines “bacronym” and doesn’t provide a
> history or any other examples of the practice, not even WAVES or SCUM.  Is
> the bacronym (or backronym; I’m never quite sure) really that well
> established?


Yeah, I wonder if the NYT's gloss, "a retroactive acronym," is enough of an
explanation for most readers. The only other hit for "bacronym" in the
Times archive is from 2012, on Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog (before
FiveThirtyEight became its own site) -- it explains it much better:

---
https://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/the-mos
t-powerful-special-interest-in-washington-the-acronym/
The specific strain of the acronym virus infecting most of Washington is
called “the bacronym.” A bacronym is a premeditated acronym, where a phrase
is chosen so that the initial letters of each word form a desired word. The
bacronym may hold little appeal for most, but in Washington bacronym-fever
is rampant.
---

I had written a similar piece for the Visual Thesaurus just a day before
that, though I went with "backronym":

https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/backronym-of-
the-week-ex-patriot-act/

More recently on the Visual Thesaurus, see this piece by Nancy Friedman,
which gives the background on "bac(k)ronym":

---
https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/candlepwr/back-to-backronyms/
Strictly speaking, SHAKEN isn't an acronym. Yes, it's "a word made from the
initial letters or parts of other words" and pronounced as a single word
rather than initial by initial. But because it's reverse-engineered from an
existing word, it's more accurately described as a backronym – defined in
an Oxford Dictionaries blog post as "an acronym deliberately created to
suit a particular word or words, either to create a memorable name, or as a
fanciful explanation of a word's origin." According to Oxford Dictionaries,
bacronym first appeared in print in 1983, as a winning entry in a
Washington Post neologism contest submitted by Meredith G. Williams of
Potomac, Maryland. Williams defined it as "same as an acronym, except the
words were chosen to fit the letters"; the bacronym spelling eventually
gave way to the more transparent backronym and all but replaced the older,
less-catchy reverse acronym.
---

Linking to:
https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/11/18/backronym-list/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1983/11/08/when
-you-cant-decide-you-just-pick-them-all/fbd4bf9c-b383-4e55-
9bd7-508cb9f69f1b/
http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-bac1.htm

>From the last link (Michael Quinion's World Wide Words):

---
Meredith Williams, in an entry to a competition in The Washington Post on 8
November 1983, seems to have coined _bacronym_, as a portmanteau of _back_
and _acronym_. Previously, lexicographer Ben Zimmer tells me, the form was
called, somewhat cumbersomely, a _prefabricated acronym_ as well as a
_reverse acronym_. The word was popularised in July 1994 by another
contest, in New Scientist, though it was then said to be a reinterpreted
acronym, neither the original nor the current principal sense.
---

I believe that relies on a thread we had here back in 2010:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2010-November/104407.html

--bgz

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