 Drama: November 01, 2023 Issue [#12247] |
This week: Acronyms Disguised as Words Edited by: Lilith 🎄 Christmas Cheer  
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"One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way."
— Frank Smith
"Our language is funny – a ‘fat chance’ and a ‘slim chance’ are the same thing."
— J. Gustav White
"The English language is so elastic that you can find another word to say the same thing."
— Mahatma Gandhi
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I recently spotted something on social media that sent me down a rabbit hole. It wasn't anything profound, but I was surprised by the number of people that didn't know the difference between "e.g." and "i.e.". In the event you are one of those people, here ya go:
I.e. means for id est (that is) or in simpler terms, 'in other words'. It is used to clarify a precedeeding statement.
E.g. means exempli gratia or 'for example. ' It's used to introduce examples and illustrate a statement.
Both i.e. and e.g. are abbreviations for Latin expressions.
And that, my friends led me down the rabbit hole we'll talk about today. Acroymns disguised as words! I'm pretty sure we all know that an acronym is an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word (e.g. ASCII, NASA ).  See what I did there? 
My search began and I'm going to share some of my findings with you today! If you know others, I'd love to hear them in the comments section at the end of this newsletter!
 BASE Jumping
Base jumping is a form of parachuting in which jumpers leap from fixed objects. Base jumping started back in the 1980s. It takes its name from the four types of fixtures that you can jump from: building, antenna, span, or Earth.
Captcha
The next time you’re asked to enter a practically illegible string of characters or numbers into a website to prove that you’re human, it’s worth remembering that Captcha stands for “completely automated public Turing Test to tell computers and humans apart.” Unsurprisingly the name was also deliberately coined to sound like capture.
Care Package
The first care packages—or rather, CARE packages—were put together in the aftermath of the Second World War with the aim of providing food relief to war-torn Europe. They were the work of what was then a newly formed humanitarian agency known as the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (later changed to the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere), founded in 1945.
Pakistan
The name Pakistan is said to be derived from the Urdu and Persian word pak, meaning “pure.” But when the name was first coined in 1933, the independence activist Choudhry Rahmat Ali also suggested that it worked as an acronym of the five northern regions of British India: Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and, giving it its final few letters, Baluchistan.
Radar and Sonar
Radar technology was developed in the lead-up to the Second World War. Its name was coined in the 1940s as an acronym of “radio detection and ranging,” and has since been used as a template for the names of other similar technologies, including sonar (“sound navigation and ranging”) and lidar (literally “light radar”).
SMART car
The Smart Automobile company, now a division of the Daimler organization, began in Germany in the late 1980s. Originally known as the “Swatchmobile” (because the car was developed by the same company that makes Swatch watches), the name Smart car was chosen in the mid-1990s as an acronym of “Swatch Mercedes Art.”
Snafu
A snafu is a mistake, or a general state of confusion or disarray. It was coined in the early 1940s, apparently by American troops during the Second World War, and according to the Oxford English Dictionary is “an expression conveying the common soldier’s laconic acceptance of the disorder of war and the ineptitude of his superiors”—namely, “situation normal, all 'messed' up.” ('messed' was swapped for the original word for the sake of a 'E' rating - but, I'm sure you can figure it out; if inclined.)
Zip Code
Zip codes were introduced to the American postal service in 1963 as a means of speeding up the delivery of the mail by dividing the country into identifiable numerical zones. There is some disagreement as to whether the zip of zip code is an acronym or a backronym, but either way it’s said to stand for “zone improvement plan.”
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