Arnold Zwicky's Blog

My mailbox overflows with birthday wishes today. On Facebook, this anagram from Betsy Herrington:

Pithy Bad Harpy, Cranky Old Wiz

which has an anagram for Happy Birthday followed by one for Arnold Zwicky.

And then from several friends in e-mail, this initialism:

hbba

which stands for “happy birthday, biiig arnold” — the latter part uses one of my pseudonyms, #4 of 37 on the list here — and can be turned into an acronym by pronouncing it like hubba, as in hubba hubba!, an exclamation, now somewhat out of date, glossed by Green’s Dictionary of Slang as

(orig. US teen/campus) a term of approval, esp. when directed at a passing girl or woman.

(Green quotes a complex origin story, which I’m not sure whether to credit, taking the expression back to military use in World War II.)

This entry was posted on September 6, 2011 at 9:00 am and is filed under Initialisms, Language play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.