It's Time For Acronyms, lol!

Today I thought we should have a look at a growing area of modern language, acronyms. These days everybody uses acronyms, often without realising, when sending SMS messages, tweeting or chatting on social network sites. Lol (short for “laughing out loud”) must be one of the most popular acronyms on the internet today. So what are acronyms? Quite simply they are words that are made up of the initial letters or partial words of the name or phrase that they represent. This is not the same as initialisation, where initials are spoken individually; to be an acronym the shortened version must be spoken as a word in its own right.

Are you confused yet? Here are some examples to show you what I mean. The United States of America is often abbreviated to USA. This is never pronounced as one word “youssay” but always as three individual letters “you, ess, ay”. This is initialisation, whereas the American space programme is run by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. This is always pronounced as one word, NASA, rather than “en, ay, ess, ay”. Because it becomes a separate word, it is an acronym. Simple, isn't it!

Initialisation has been around since Roman times, but acronyms as we now know them started to appear in the English language in the 19^th century. One of the first modern acronyms, which is still in use today, is the word “posh”. This word, which is now used to describe wealthy members of society, dates back to the days of the British Empire. Those who needed to travel to India and Burma, and had the wealth to choose their cabins, preferred to be accommodated on the north side of the vessel, which was more shaded, and therefore cooler. This meant they travelled on the port side going out, and the starboard side on the return journey. The initials of Port Out Starboard Home became the word “posh”.

Acronyms came into more common use from the 1940s onwards, as a means to help the understanding of increasingly complex scientific and technical terms. Everyone has heard of lasers, radar and scuba diving, but not many know that these terms are all acronyms: laser stands for Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation; radar stands for RAdio Detection And Ranging, and scuba stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Acronyms also became popular in the social sciences; some of the popular sociographic and demographic descriptors which came into everyday use in the 1980s were “Yuppie” (Young Urban Professional) and “Dinkie” (Double Income No Kids). However none of these can match the wonderful description of an older person living life to the full, “Skier” (Spending the Kid's Inheritance)!

Of course, this article being about language, nothing is ever that simple! Advancing technology brings with it new concepts, which require language to adapt to accommodate them. We are now seeing the growth of terminology that combines initialisation with acronyms. We all knew what a DVD was – something you could use to watch recorded TV and movies. Those of us with computers knew that ROM was Read Only Memory, and maybe understood that this was something to do with storing computer programmes. Now we have the Digital Versatile Disc – Read Only Memory, or the DVD-ROM as it is better known, which is always spoken as three initials followed by one word (dee, vee, dee, rom). In the same way, the Joint Photographic Experts Group, JPEG, is always spoken as one initial followed by a word (jay-peg), and is the most common format for storing digital photographs.

New ways of creating acronyms are also being introduced to the language. The need for brevity when sending text messages, and the popularity of instant messaging on the internet, has seen a range of new acronyms in common usage, which often use written numbers to represent spoken syllables in a shortened form. 2Moro obviously reads as tomorrow, but uses less characters and is quicker to type. In the same way, before is shortened to b4, and mate becomes m8. Finally, there is my favourite of all the new acronyms, cul8r, which reads “see you later”.

Cul8r, and don't forget to visit our website www.writtenenglishcorrected.com, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.