Indeed, Dissent! I noted the dual pronunciation of lol in a footnote, and *almost* commented on the slight difference in connotation before deciding that I’m not 100 percent qualified to comment on that topic.
That's what I get for not reading the footnotes for once!
For posterity, then, I can affirm that the difference is that the speaker of lawl is more self-aware at how silly it is to use LOL as a word out loud. The amusement indicated by it is no less genuine, interestingly. It might be mocking or ironic against LOL, but only in the same way a ten-year-old might pretend to no longer enjoy his favorite movie while still actually enjoying it.
SOS is because of being memorable in Morse code as dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot. (Which I expect you already knew.) Two occasions when I've been alerted to distressed people on mountains, one was SOS as morse flashes, the other was the three letters shouted.
Could also cite MAD for mutually assured destruction in Cold War, the doctrine that both sides had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other even after receiving a full force attack. And the Belgian author Hergé (Tintin books) whose pseudonym is a backwards acronym from the letters R G pronounced in French.
It always seemed to me that the main reason some acronyms are pronounced as words and some aren't is simply whether they have an obvious pronunciation in English. It's easy to see how laser would likely be pronounced, but gps has no vowels.
As for usage, acronyms like DRY can only effectively be used as words in a sentence when the speaker is confident all listeners will understand it. So I actually do hear DRY occasionally properly used in a sentence, but only by programmers talking to programmers. Even tech managers instead use it as "the DRY principle" instead.
Phonetic pronounceability is, indeed, the reason for the different approach—another reason I prefer to group ’em all together as acronyms.
I’ll take your word for it on DRY as programmer jargon (not one I know from my IT days, but my programming skills were always rudimentary)! So, in that context, an acronym like DRY can *become*, or be used as, an ordinary word, where it wouldn’t be in another context. Have you ever heard anyone use KISS in a sentence? :-)
DRY, being an architectural/clean-code principle has a pretty limited audience. KISS is more general, which maybe part of the problem. I've occasionally heard someone use "KISS theory" in a sentence, but it seems to require a clarifying add-on like that, to have a clear meaning at all. Makes it kind of useless as an acronym, and literally fails KISS, all by itself.
I've never seen fubar as "beyond belief", and that doesn't fit the acronym. I've always heard "beyond all reason", which does. Is this some strange NJ thing? 😆
Actually, I meant to write “beyond all recognition,” but I accidentally leapfrogged to “fubb,” a related but different acronym! Thanks for the catch (now fixed, with additional info).
My favorite one-off for this topic is xkcd - the creator of this comic strip series intentionally picked it as a word (it’s not an abbreviation for anything) because it was specifically not able to be pronounced as a word that wasn’t just saying the actual letters!
So, not an acronym, or even an initialization—just a term like SOS that strings letters together in a non-phonetic way. I called SOS a “code”; xkcd would seem to be simply a “name,” though an unusual sort of name. Not sure I have a ready word for that!
Most kind! And your preference is entirely legitimate—I confess I have a bias toward taxonomies based on subset relationships rather than atomistic distinctions. (Squares are a type of rectangle; tortoises are a type of turtle; similes are a type of metaphor; etc.)
P.S. What do you call the odd hybrids like JPEG and CD-ROM?
Good question, Christopher! The term was coined in the 1950s by Project Blue Book head Edward J. Ruppelt as a more precise and scientific alternative to “flying saucer.” Ruppelt explicitly endorsed the pronunciation “you-foe” (a pronunciation still honored in the name of the field of “ufology”).
It’s possible, though, this original pronunciation never gained wide traction in mainstream culture. Certainly by the mid-1970s, when I became aware of the notion of UFOs, the initialized pronunciation was ubiquitous. I’ve asked a friend who knows a lot about this area; will let you know if I learn anything!
It's a bit nerdy, but the website coding language PHP is considered to be a 'recursive' acronym... The name being an abbreviation of "PHP Hypertext Protocol".
If I were to get into a heated argument with you on this topic, would that be considered an acronymonious conversation?
But regarding acronyms, the NYT annoys me in its insistence on using periods in acronyms that are, as you describe, "initialisms" -- with them, it's the National Football League is the N.F.L., not the NFL. And yet, it's NASCAR, not N.A.S.C.A.R.! Go figure! Here's a story that has both examples:
Not long ago, they actually used Nascar (not NASCAR), and their logic was weird -- if it's more than 4 letters long, and *pronounced like a word* (important distinction), treat it like an actual word. Here's how it was phrased in their 2015 style guide:
"In an acronym — an abbreviation pronounced as a word — omit periods.
Ordinarily uppercase such an expression if it is up to four letters long: NATO;
CUNY; AIDS; SALT. Acronyms of five or more letters are upper-and-lowercased:
Unicef; Unesco; Alcoa; Awacs. (Lowercased exceptions exist, and the dictionary is the
Interestingly, LOL is both pronounced initialistically and as a word, lawl, with slight differences in the connotation.
Indeed, Dissent! I noted the dual pronunciation of lol in a footnote, and *almost* commented on the slight difference in connotation before deciding that I’m not 100 percent qualified to comment on that topic.
That's what I get for not reading the footnotes for once!
For posterity, then, I can affirm that the difference is that the speaker of lawl is more self-aware at how silly it is to use LOL as a word out loud. The amusement indicated by it is no less genuine, interestingly. It might be mocking or ironic against LOL, but only in the same way a ten-year-old might pretend to no longer enjoy his favorite movie while still actually enjoying it.
Thanks for the clarification! “Somehow ironic” was as close as I could have come to it. :-)
SOS is because of being memorable in Morse code as dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot. (Which I expect you already knew.) Two occasions when I've been alerted to distressed people on mountains, one was SOS as morse flashes, the other was the three letters shouted.
Could also cite MAD for mutually assured destruction in Cold War, the doctrine that both sides had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other even after receiving a full force attack. And the Belgian author Hergé (Tintin books) whose pseudonym is a backwards acronym from the letters R G pronounced in French.
Ah, that’s a lovely bit of Tintin trivia that I didn’t know! Thank you for that!
It always seemed to me that the main reason some acronyms are pronounced as words and some aren't is simply whether they have an obvious pronunciation in English. It's easy to see how laser would likely be pronounced, but gps has no vowels.
As for usage, acronyms like DRY can only effectively be used as words in a sentence when the speaker is confident all listeners will understand it. So I actually do hear DRY occasionally properly used in a sentence, but only by programmers talking to programmers. Even tech managers instead use it as "the DRY principle" instead.
Phonetic pronounceability is, indeed, the reason for the different approach—another reason I prefer to group ’em all together as acronyms.
I’ll take your word for it on DRY as programmer jargon (not one I know from my IT days, but my programming skills were always rudimentary)! So, in that context, an acronym like DRY can *become*, or be used as, an ordinary word, where it wouldn’t be in another context. Have you ever heard anyone use KISS in a sentence? :-)
DRY, being an architectural/clean-code principle has a pretty limited audience. KISS is more general, which maybe part of the problem. I've occasionally heard someone use "KISS theory" in a sentence, but it seems to require a clarifying add-on like that, to have a clear meaning at all. Makes it kind of useless as an acronym, and literally fails KISS, all by itself.
I've never seen fubar as "beyond belief", and that doesn't fit the acronym. I've always heard "beyond all reason", which does. Is this some strange NJ thing? 😆
Actually, I meant to write “beyond all recognition,” but I accidentally leapfrogged to “fubb,” a related but different acronym! Thanks for the catch (now fixed, with additional info).
My favorite one-off for this topic is xkcd - the creator of this comic strip series intentionally picked it as a word (it’s not an abbreviation for anything) because it was specifically not able to be pronounced as a word that wasn’t just saying the actual letters!
So, not an acronym, or even an initialization—just a term like SOS that strings letters together in a non-phonetic way. I called SOS a “code”; xkcd would seem to be simply a “name,” though an unusual sort of name. Not sure I have a ready word for that!
Marvelous! (I’m rather strict about calling acronyms acronyms and initialisms initialisms.)
Most kind! And your preference is entirely legitimate—I confess I have a bias toward taxonomies based on subset relationships rather than atomistic distinctions. (Squares are a type of rectangle; tortoises are a type of turtle; similes are a type of metaphor; etc.)
P.S. What do you call the odd hybrids like JPEG and CD-ROM?
I like to call them “odd hybrids like JPEG and CD-ROM”!
THAT WORKS
I was born in 1984, and I have never heard UFO being pronounced as "you-fo." When did that stop?
Good question, Christopher! The term was coined in the 1950s by Project Blue Book head Edward J. Ruppelt as a more precise and scientific alternative to “flying saucer.” Ruppelt explicitly endorsed the pronunciation “you-foe” (a pronunciation still honored in the name of the field of “ufology”).
It’s possible, though, this original pronunciation never gained wide traction in mainstream culture. Certainly by the mid-1970s, when I became aware of the notion of UFOs, the initialized pronunciation was ubiquitous. I’ve asked a friend who knows a lot about this area; will let you know if I learn anything!
FWIW, the two-syllable pronunciation is used in what would probably be my favorite neo-pagan drinking song even if I knew several such, written c. 1984: https://lesliefish.bandcamp.com/track/the-gods-aren-t-crazy
Very interesting, Steven! I certainly always believed the Goebbels quote, as much as if I had read it in a top quality history book.
Thank you! I think this comment was meant for this piece…
https://greydanus.substack.com/p/misquoting-the-pope-and-everyone
It's a bit nerdy, but the website coding language PHP is considered to be a 'recursive' acronym... The name being an abbreviation of "PHP Hypertext Protocol".
If I were to get into a heated argument with you on this topic, would that be considered an acronymonious conversation?
But regarding acronyms, the NYT annoys me in its insistence on using periods in acronyms that are, as you describe, "initialisms" -- with them, it's the National Football League is the N.F.L., not the NFL. And yet, it's NASCAR, not N.A.S.C.A.R.! Go figure! Here's a story that has both examples:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/business/nascar-pit-crews-football-players.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Kk8.ZjDk.DIDVOhO-KyuN&smid=url-share
Not long ago, they actually used Nascar (not NASCAR), and their logic was weird -- if it's more than 4 letters long, and *pronounced like a word* (important distinction), treat it like an actual word. Here's how it was phrased in their 2015 style guide:
"In an acronym — an abbreviation pronounced as a word — omit periods.
Ordinarily uppercase such an expression if it is up to four letters long: NATO;
CUNY; AIDS; SALT. Acronyms of five or more letters are upper-and-lowercased:
Unicef; Unesco; Alcoa; Awacs. (Lowercased exceptions exist, and the dictionary is the
guide: modem; radar; sonar.)"
https://g-city.sass.org.cn/_upload/article/files/ac/75/38ee1620428f940e88eb3ac5ba94/baa1f669-cdcb-45d4-b9bb-2eb2ab442d1f.pdf