User:Nohat/Acronyms

The thing is, Merriam-Webster do not list "abbreviation" as a secondary meaning of acronym. They list "an abbreviation (as FBI) formed from initial letters: INITIALISM" as a secondary meaning of acronym. The diference is enormous.

The thing is that there is a qualitative difference between abbreviations that are just "abbreviations" and things like FBI and NASA. An abbreviation, such as Mr., Dr., etc., pp., is just an orthographic convention for writing a word which is shorter than the "full" way of writing the word. When we see "Dr." we think "doctor". On the other hand, FBI is not an orthographic shortening of "Federal Bureau of Investigation". When we read "FBI", we do not say "Federal Bureau of Investigation", we say "FBI". The difference between abbreviations and acronyms is that acronyms are their own name: they are linguistic entities that are completely independent from what the letters stand for, having a relationship to their expansion that is much more akin to an ordinary word's definition than to the expansion of an ordinary "abbreviation". I entirely agree that abbreviations and acronyms should not be confused: what we do not agree on is that things like FBI are much more like things like NASA and very little like abbreviations.

The problem is that there is this supersition, akin to similar superstitions about, say, using "unique" as a relative comparator, or using "hopefully" as a sentence adverb, that "acronym" can only refer to initialisms that can be pronounced as words. But the reality is that things like "FBI" and things like "NASA" really form a natural class of linguistics things that are not so easily divided.

For one, there is a large bestiary of intermediate forms and other varities. We have the kind that are not pronounced as just the names of the letters, but have a kind of "shortcut" built in—NAACP, NCAA, AAA, IEEE. We have the kind that replaces multiple letters with a multiplier, the W3C, 3M, E3. We have the kind where one of the letters doesn't actually stand for anything because it stands for the thing itself, like VISA, GNU, WINE. "Fine", you say. "Those are just minor variations of things like 'FBI'. That doesn't make the qualitatively the same as things like 'NASA'." But then there are the kind that can be pronounced either as words or as the names of letters, like FAQ, SQL, and VAT. What would you call those? Heisen-acronyms, whose status of whether or not it is an "acronym" depends on how you say it? And finally, and most damning of the notion that these things can be clearly cleaved into two distinct categories are the kind that have both letter names and normal word pronunciation mixed up together: JPEG, IUPAC, CD-ROM, PDFORRA.

The analogy comparing the use of "acronym" to describe things like "IBM" to the use of "comprise" to mean to "compose" is not particularly apt. The distinction between "comprise" and "compose" can sometimes be tricky because it is not always obvious what is making up what. Quick, are the 9 First Nations comprised of the Algonquins or do the 9 First Nations comprise the Algonquins? On the other hand, there is nothing dificult to understand about being pronounced as word or being pronounced as the names of letters. The reason people use "acronym" to describe things like "IBM" is because things like "IBM" and things like "NASA" form a natural class.

The reality is that people do not make a distinction between these not because they are misinformed and undereducated, like when people

re isn't really a significant qualitative

So then we come to the dictionary definitions. What is interesting about them is that none of them make explicit what the prescriptivists claim. They all say that what. People make them in the same way. Who are we to say that /aIbi'Em/ is any less of a word than /'nas@/?