[Ads-l] A bacronym named Steve

Wed Mar 21 15:45:10 UTC 2018

Two proto-backronyms (as given in Dave Wilton's _Word Myths_ and elsewhere)
are:

ICHTHYS = Iesous CHristos, THeou Yios, Soter
CABAL = Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley-Cooper, Lauderdale (high
councillors of Charles II)

As for CARE, John Algeo writes this in "The Acronym and Its Congeners"
(LACUS Forum 1974):

"One clear sign of the prefabricated acronym is confusion about what the
initials are supposed to stand for. Thus, Care has been glossed in one
place or another as Cooperative Agency for the Relief of Europe, Committee
for American Relief in Europe . Cooperative for American Remittances to
Europe. Cooperative for American Remittances (to) Everywhere. Cooperative
for American Relief Everywhere, and doubtless in other ways as well. What
the letters of Care stand for is of secondary interest; the word they spell
has priority of importance and quite likely of chronology too."

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 11:19 AM, Mark Mandel <mark.a.mandel at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
> >
> >
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org