Pylimitics

These days the language we use is full of acronyms. Probably too full; people are so used to acronyms that they sometimes assume that a word that’s not an acronym must be one, so they invent it. When they do that, they’re creating a “backronym.” For example, there’s a test applied to newborn babies to check their health: the “Apgar score.” It checks various responses and physical characteristics. Now, “Apgar” does sort of sound like an acronym that might stand for Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration. But really it was named after Virginia Apgar, MD, the US doctor who came up with it.

Sometimes backronyms are created for things that don’t immediately suggest that they’re acronyms. The “Amber Alert program” is a public safety system notifying the public about a missing child. It MIGHT stand for “America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response.” But it doesn’t; it was named after Amber Hagerman, a child who went missing.

“Acronym” sounds like a classical word, since it’s formed from the Greek and Latin “acro-” (the highest or most prominent portion of something, like the first letter of a word), followed by “-onym,” another Greek root meaning “name.” But really it’s quite new as words go; it appeared in the early 20th century. It was originally a German word “akronym,” and didn’t show up in English until the 1920s. Even decades later people were still explaining it, as in this article from the 1940 Paris Gazette: “Pee-gee-enn. It’s an acronym [Ger. Akronym], that’s what it is. That’s what they call words made up of initials.”

“Backronym” is even more recent; it was coined in 1983 by Meredith Williams — it was her entry into a contest run by the Washington Post. Before that, people were still creating phony acronyms, but they were called “prefabricated acronyms” or “reverse acronyms.”

Some popular backronyms have been invented for Microsoft Bing (“Because It’s Not Google”), golf (“Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden”), the Sherlock Society (“Sherlock Holmes Enthusiastic Readers League of Criminal Knowledge”), and “achoo” — that’s right, a simple sneeze (“autosomol dominant compelling helio-ophthalmic outburst”).

On the other hand, some things really are acronyms, even though you might not expect it. “ZIP” in the US postal ZIP code stands for “Zone Improvement Plan,” and the USA Patriot Act says, right in the original legislation, that it stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.” Somebody probably worked for hours on that one. “Scuba,” as in diving, is a real acronym: “Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.” But then there’s “SOS,” the international distress call. It does not stand for “Save Our Souls,” as many people believe. It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s just an easy to remember sequence in Morse Code (…—…).