Notes on my Friday and Saturday, doing things, with the help of Elizabeth Traugott, to get ready for surgery on Wednesday. Friday afternoon at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (family practice and physical therapy), Saturday morning at the Stanford University Medical Center and the Footwear Etc. store in Palo Alto. (Otherwise, a lot of exhausted sleep.) With some linguistic observations along the way.
Archive for the ‘Initialisms’ Category
Pre-op days
November 11, 2012For short
October 18, 2012From an appointment on October 2nd with an orthopedist, the clipping nec fac /nɛk fæk/ for necrotizing fasciitis (from the doctor). This was a new abbreviation of the disease name for me; I was accustomed to the initialism NF /ɛn ɛf/ (from other doctors). And I wondered about the /fæk/ piece of the clipping, where I would have expected /fæʃ/ or /fæs/, given the full pronunciation of fasciitis, with one or the other of these as the first syllable.
Still more fun with initialisms
September 7, 2012Today’s Bizarro returns to play with initialisms:
That would be Curly, Larry and Moe in the original, with Moe replaced by a chimerical genetically modified organism (GMO).
Taboo initialism avoidance
August 9, 2012In today’s NYT, “Making Facebook Less Infantile” by Austin Considine, about reactions to parents’ posting so much material about their babies, referring to
a new Web tool called Unbaby.me, which replaces the baby pictures on Facebook feeds with things that people prefer to see, like photos of cats, sunsets and bacon.
and noting that
There are already blogs devoted to mocking over-sharing parents who, for example, post photos of their placentas. (“You used to be fun,” reads the tagline. “Now you have a baby.”) A tongue-in-cheek clothing line called AntiBaby sells T-shirts, hats and baby bibs sporting slogans like “I’m not pro-abortion, I’m anti-baby!”
The first of these references is apparently to a specific site, which is unnamed and unlinked-to in the Times story. Because the paper finds it offensive.
More play with initialisms
August 7, 2012A little while ago, a Rhymes With Orange with a play on LMAO (vs. MAO). Now today’s Bizarro, with another initialism play:
That’s ATM (automated / automatic teller machine) vs. TM (Transcendental Meditation). Other pairs: MIT vs. IT, DVD vs. VD, ETA vs. TA, IBM vs. BM, ISO vs. SO,… (most of them not lending themselves easily to depiction in a cartoon).
The Chairman laughs
August 3, 2012Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
Chairman Mao. Chairman Mao with his phone: “Laughing My Ass off”. (Going all the way to LMFAO would ruin the visual effect.)
I wonder if there are people who object to LMAO because it’s “bad language” or “obscene”, the way some people object to WTF and its kin. (The taint of the abbreviated word is inherited by its initial letter.)
Potentially embarrassing acronyms
July 12, 2012In the Economist of June 30th, in a story “Shaking it all up”) on the long-standing armed insurgency in Mindinao (the southernmost region of the Philippines):
This, however, failed to satisfy the aspirations of the main separatist group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF — the insurgency is so old that its acronym predates embarrassment).
The insurgency goes back to the early 1960s (as the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), formally established as MILF in 1984), while the initialism (for “Mother/Mom/Mum I‘d Like to Fuck”) goes back to the early 1990s.
I say STD, you think FTD
June 4, 2012Today’s Zits, with an exchange between Walt and Connie Duncan about their son Jeremy’s experience in his human biology class:
Jeremy said “STD”, Walt could dredge up only “FTD”; well, the initialisms are phonologically very close.
Alphabeticals
March 13, 2012Yesterday’s Bizarro:
Names of letters deployed in various ways, mostly (but not entirely) as abbreviations, as in J for Jennifer and e for electronic.
Harry Morgan and abbreviations
December 25, 2011While notable and admirable people, like Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens, have died recently, and the New York Times Magazine today did its annual issue on “The Lives They Lived”, featuring many less famous people who died during the year, somewhere in the middle range are people like the character actor Harry Morgan, who died early in December. I’m a fan of durable character actors — and (linguist alert!) Morgan’s M*A*S*H character Col. Sherman Potter was also notable for the way he referred to the Second World War.