http://www.lyberty.com/encyc/articles/abbr.html
The link above gives a succinct account of what constitutes an abbreviation (the general term for any contractions of words, phrases or concepts), an acronym and an initialism. Many people use the term "acronym" when they refer to "initialism".
In yesterday's posting, the abbreviated Shangri-La Dialogue would be SLD. You would not try to pronounce it as a new word but say Es-El-Dee. Hence, it is an initialism, and the convention is to capitalise every letter.
But Nato (for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) is spoken out as a word, Nay-Toe, so it is an acronym. It is a matter of preference or house style whether to capitalise just the first letter or all the letters, as in NATO.
Some acronyms and initialisms can backfire, as is the case with Nato. Wags call it "No Action, Talk Only", not an inaccurate moniker in the early 1990s when the alliance was dithering over whether to intervene in civil war-wracked Yugoslavia.
I also mentioned in yesterday's posting that, during the Cold War, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (Start) might well have gone Fart if a suggestion to rename it Faster Arms Reduction Talks had been taken up.
The classic Cold War-era acronym is MAD, for Mutual Assured Destruction. This is the anticipated nuclear armaggedon that will happen should the US and the USSR (both initialisms here) lob nuclear-armed missiles at each other in an all-out nuclear war.
In the Singapore context, the government's (superseded) "dating agency" SDU (Social Development Unit) was lampooned as "Single, Desperate and Ugly". I have already pointed out what some people label (and libel?) some political parties here. I am sure there are funny takes on ERP, COE, CPF, HDB, etc.
But how many people knew that Nanyang Technological University (NTU) might well have become NUT (Nanyang University of Technology) if not for someone at a very high level who stopped the absurdity! And did you notice that Ngee Ann Polytechnic is abbreviated to NP? It certainly was not caught NAP-ping.
I think this uniquely Singaporean contraction qualifies as an acronym: O$P$ (owe money, pay money).
Coming back to MAD, this was an unusual acronym in its time. It has only three letters, and is monosyllabic. Most acronyms have at least four letters and have more than one syllable, as in Nato.
Thus, we have SIA (initialism) but Qantas (acronym). But among our expressways, one -- PIE -- seems to be chameleon-like. If you say "Pie", then PIE is being used as an acronym. But if you say "Pee-Eye-Ee", it is then an initialism.
Here are some acronyms that result from situations, concepts or inventions:
Snafu -- Situation normal, all fouled-up (as when everything's now a mess)
Nimby -- Not in my backyard (sure, Singapore needs yet another NeWater plant, but please site it in another neighbourhood)
Scuba -- Self contained underwater breathing apparatus
Radar -- Radio detection and ranging
Laser -- Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (whew! thank goodness for acronyms.)
Captcha -- Completely Automated Public Turing Tests To Tell Computers and Humans Apart (wheeeew! These are the distorted words a website may generate when a computer user, say, wants to post a comment. The website visitor is asked to type in those words before he is allowed to post his comments. Humans should be able to make them out but machines typically cannot; so it is meant to thwart automated spamming computers. Pronounce this acronym as "capture".)
Finally, have you created your own wacky acronym? How about this pseudo-medical one... SODOMY, for School of Orthodontics, Dentistry, Oral Medicine and Yawn-suppression.
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