[Ads-l] A bacronym named Steve

[Mark Mandel]

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?


¹ The Virginia Apgar Papers (
https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/CP/Views/Exhibit/narrative/obstetric.html):

By the early 1960s, many hospitals were using Apgar's scoring method. In
> 1961, Dr. Joseph Butterfield at the University of Colorado Medical Center
> in Denver wrote to Apgar with the news that one of his residents had used
> the letters of her name as a mnemonic device for the five scoring criteria:
> A- Appearance (Color)
> P- Pulse (Heart rate)
> G- Grimace (Reflex irritability)
> A- Activity (Muscle tone)
> R- Respiration
> Apgar was delighted with the epigram *[sic]*, and it was rapidly adopted.
> New users of the method (and parents of newborns) often didn't realize that
> the Apgar Score was actually named for a person. As she told Butterfield,
> Apgar was once greeted by a secretary at a Boston hospital, who said, "Oh,
> I didn't know Apgar was a person; I thought it was just a thing!"


² Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARE_(relief_agency)#History):

   - CARE, then the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe,[3] was
   formally founded on November 27, 1945
   - In 1953, because of its expansion to projects outside Europe, CARE
   changed the meaning of its acronym to "Cooperative for American Remittances
   to Everywhere".[4]
   - [I]n 1959 CARE changed the meaning of its acronym a second time,
   becoming the "Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere".[4]
   - In 1993 CARE, to reflect its international organizational structure,
   changed the meaning of its acronym for a third time, adopting its current
   name the "Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere".[13]


Mark Mandel

____________________________________


On Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 11:11 PM Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 8:39 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
> wrote:
>
> > Or should that be STEVE?
> > ...
> > 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?
>
> --
>


> 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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