[Ads-l] A bacronym named Steve

Wed Mar 21 15:45:20 UTC 2018

> On 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?

How about WAVES, the Naval counterpart to WACs, formed in 1942? I understood WAVES to have been created to allow the bac(k)ronym, which turns out to “stand for" Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.  Turns out my memory is half-right, given the motivation of “the idea of the sea”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAVES
They also recognized the importance of a name: agreeing it should be one suitable for the organization envisioned. To Reynard fell the task of finding such a name.[11] In explaining how she came up with the nautical name, Reynard said: "I realized there were two letters that had to be in it: W for women and V for volunteer, because the Navy wants to make it clear that this is a voluntary service and not a drafted service. So, I played with those two letters and the idea of the sea and finally came up with Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service – WAVES. I figured the word Emergency would comfort the older admirals because it implies that we're only a temporary crisis and won't be around for keeps."[12] Reynard was later commissioned a lieutenant in the WAVES.

And arguably a somewhat earlier one was the fish (appearing on a bumper sticker near you) for ICHTHYS, a.k.a. the Jesus fish:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys

LH
> 
> 
> 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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