Something that troubles me is the corruption of the English language. However, I have come to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter. My reasons for thinking this are the subject of another blog (as yet unwritten), which gives me enough time to have a moan about my latest complaint.
Today's subject matter are Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations. I've noticed a lot of people are misusing the term 'acronym' when they actually mean 'initialism'. I've always understood the uses this way:
Top level : Abbreviation. This covers the shortening of words and phrases.
Subset of Abbreviation : Initialism. This covers abbreviations that use the initial letters of the words/phrases being shortened.
Subset of Initialism : Acronym. This refers to those initialisms that can be said as a new word, such as SCUBA but not HTML.
Wikipedia has a good writeup on the above and goes much further with the detail, making an interesting read.
What's fascinating is that the whole initialism scenario is a very recent occurance, mostly only popular in the last century. What really got me started on this was all those emails going around that claim to give the meanings of initialisms. Since most of these claims point back to centuries ago, that alone is cause for scepticism. While most obvious bogus expansions of initialisms such as GOLF and POSH were easy to spot, I was surprised to find that the international distress signal SOS was never intended to stand for Save Our Souls/Ship, but was in fact picked purely for its easy recognizability in Morse code. See Backronyms. Also worthy of a look are False Etymology and Fake Etymology.
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