Archive for the ‘Acronyms’ Category
May 1, 2026
đ đ đ rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate the month of May — Mayday celebrating labor, spring (new growth, rebirth, fertility), and romance, in a variety of ways (parades, dancing, maypoles, bonfires, public displays of affection)
From Hana Filip on Facebook this morning:
May 1: Workers’ Labo(u)r Day (international) and the day of (romantic) love celebration (a kind of Valentine Day on May 1 in the Czech Republic). Two seemingly incompatible ideas. Karel Äapek sees a connection between the two: “It is love that wreaked / inflicted on us life and all its travails … and so, dear friends, on Workers’ Labour Day we must talk about (romantic) love.”  [AZ: Äapek coined robot ‘humanoid machine’ from Czech robota âforced laborâ]
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Posted in Abbreviation, Acronyms, Events and occasions, French, Holidays, Language and plants, Language of sex, Signs and symbols, Work | 3 Comments »
September 27, 2022
(Content warning: the F-word and the F-act (especially between men) figure prominently, though not vividly, in what is to come. So do hiphop clothing and tofu burgers, but if you’re uncomfortable with the harder-core F-stuff, you should skip this posting.)
Caught in passing on Facebook, a guy reporting something he heard from his FUBU, which baffled me; I was dimly aware of a FUBU clothing line, but this guy must have been talking about something else.
I realize that many of my readers will have recognized the (complex) acronym immediately and so think I must be dim-witted, but I had to go look it up. The acronym is a distant cousin of FUBAR, and its abbreviatum is something I have fairly often written about on this blog, but always spelled out in full.
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Posted in Abbreviation, Acronyms, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language in advertising, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »
February 24, 2022
(References in plain language to men’s bodies viewed as sexual objects, with a photo, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
On Facebook yesterday, information from train-watcher Ned Deily about FREDs. That’s FRED, an acronym for flashing rear-end device — an alternative name for end of train device, no doubt devised to provide a pronounceable acronym (FRED) rather than a mere initialism (like ETD). But then we get then nominal rear end, referring not only generally to the back part of something, but also specifically to a person’s buttocks. Which takes us into racy or frankly raunchy territory.
FRED 1, the flashing rear-end device. In brief, from Wikipedia (a) on the end of train device; and then from the Trains & Locomotives Wiki (b) on “End of Train Device” (edited for readability):
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Posted in Abbreviation, Acronyms, Initialisms, Language and the body, Metonymy | Leave a Comment »
December 16, 2020
A recent Tom Gauld bookish cartoon:
Commenters tend to note that the first two piles seem to be way too small for most serious book people.
Sign of the times: “Books I want people to see behind me on Zoom calls”.
Posted in Acronyms, Books, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
September 12, 2019
E-mail from the Stanford linguistics department on the 10th, under the header:
Save the Date: BOY Party 9/27
Whoa! I thought, conjuring up images of a department party featuring attractive young men — as entertainers (maybe some lesser-known boy bands), as guests of honor (very young up-and-coming NLP entrepreneurs, perhaps), as party staff (a phalanx of Ganymedes, in costume), purely as eye candy (twinks on parade), whatever — things are really loosening up in Margaret Jacks Hall!
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Posted in Abbreviation, Acronyms, Categorization and Labeling, Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Semantics of compounds, Social life, Underwear | 2 Comments »
May 18, 2019
(OPAs, for short.) The contrast is to inconspicuously playful allusions, what I’ve called Easter egg quotations on this blog. With three OPAs from the 4/20/19 Economist, illustrating three levels of closeness between the content of the OPA and the topic of the article: no substantive relationship between the two (the Nock, Nock case), tangential relationship (the Sunset brouhaha case), and tight relationship (the defecate in the woods case).
The three cases also illustrate three degrees of paronomasia: the Nock, Nock case involves a (phonologically) perfect pun; the Sunset brouhaha case an imperfect pun; and the defecate in the woods case no pun at all, but whole-word substitutions.
I’ll start in the middle, with Sunset brouhaha. But first, some background. Which will incorporate flaming saganaki; be prepared.
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Posted in Acronyms, Allusion, Ambiguity, Idioms, Implicature, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and food, Language play, Metaphor, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Names, Pragmatics, Puns, Quotation, Sarcasm and irony, Semantics, Speech acts | 3 Comments »
October 24, 2018
In this morning’s comics feed: a Zippy with the slogan “Kindness, Acceptance, Inclusion”; a Bizarro with a Discomfort Control mechanism; and a Rhymes With Orange about the facial recognition of a Mr. Banner. The first two can be understood at some level even if you don’t get the cultural references involved (though they’re much more entertaining if you do), but the third is probably just incomprehensible if you don’t recognize Mr. Banner.
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Posted in Acronyms, Holidays, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Science, Technology | 1 Comment »
April 25, 2017
Yesterday, a posting on a mini-phal /mIni fĂŠl/, a miniature Phalaenopsis (orchid). Which moved me to investigate names of the form /mIni CĂŠl/, for various consonants C: existing names and ones you can invent, using a /CĂŠl/ that’s an existing word (pal, gal), a clipping (phal for Phalaenopsis, Cal for California), a nickname (Cal for Calvin, Sal for Sally, Salvatore, or Salvador), or an acronym (HAL for hook and line, HAL for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer).
What follows is a mere sampling of such cases, not intended to be exhaustive.
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Posted in Abbreviation, Acronyms, Clipping, Language play, Names, Nicknames, Phallicity, Toys and games | 1 Comment »
