What is your view in the
Great Acronym Debate?
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There
is a great debate brewing about what is and isn't an acronym. The
etymology of acronym is: 'Acr-' which is from Greek, meaning tip, and -onym
that is from English meaning 'name'.
American Notes & Queries (Feb 1943): 167/1,
records the first use of acronym writing that it is a: "Word, made up of the
initial letters or syllables of other words I have seen ... called by the name
acronym."
On
one side of the debate, some refer to the use of 'word' in the definition of
acronym means that a group of initials can only be considered an acronym if they
are pronounceable, just as RADAR
(Radio Detection and Ranging). Any other
groupings of initials should be considered abbreviations, or initialisms.
They often base their conclusion on various dictionary entries
considering this to be the end of the story. The strength of the argument
to replace the use of 'acronym' with 'initialism' based on the fact that
some dictionaries say that an acronym has to be pronounceable, appears to
be only slightly hampered by the fact that very few dictionaries recognize
that 'initialism' is a word at all.
Others
believe that sticking to the etymology of the word implies "word
taken from the beginning of words" and that ability to pronounce the
word is entirely secondary. Indeed, why should people have to use
multiple words to describe what is fundamentally the same thing?
They can cite the fact that the definition of 'word' found at Dictionary.com
is: "A sound or a combination of
sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and
communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination
of morphemes." (Morphemes being: "A meaningful linguistic unit
consisting of a word, such as man, or a word element, such as -ed
in walked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts.").
Doesn't IBM communicate a meaning the exact way that NASA does?
Therefore, shouldn't IBM be considered an acronym based on the original definition
of the word?
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