Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: Back to backronyms

In my newest column for the Visual Thesaurus, I take a look at backronyms, defined in an Oxford Dictionaries blog post as “an acronym deliberately created to suit a particular word or words, either to create a memorable name, or as a fanciful explanation of a word’s origin.” Backronyms are rife in the names of legislation: witness the recent HONEST, COVFEFE, and MAR-A-LAGO acts. It’s a tradition that goes back to the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, whose rah-rah title expands into “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”

Backronym was coined (as bacronym) in 1983; examples were rare before then.

Full access to the column is available only to subscribers for three months. Here’s an excerpt:

Bummerr

I’ve been holding my tongue and staying my pen since January, when Fiverr – the online marketplace that matches skinflint budget-conscious business owners with freelancers willing to work for as little as $5 a gig* – launched its first ad campaign, “In Doers We Trust.” But my initial distaste for the ads has not faded with time.

 

 “Dreamers, Kindly Step Aside.”

MAR-A-LAGO

Last week five Democratic congressmen introduced a bill that would require the Trump administration to release the visitor logs at the White House or wherever else the president holds court – including Mar-a-Lago, the Trump-owned private Florida club that the president likes to call the “Southern White House” and which the club’s website calls “The Legendary Pinnacle of Palm Beach.”

The name of the bill: Making Access Records Available to Lead American Government Openness, or MAR-A-LAGO.

 

 

Acronym in the news: SWAT

On Monday, the Current Occupant announced a new executive department: the White House Office of American Innovation, to be headed by his 36-year-old son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Like #45, young Master Kushner has never served in government or the military or worked for anyone other than his father – as a Chicago Tribune op-ed put it, “his entire experience in public administration can be counted on two calendar pages” – but he does possess the singular advantage of sharing a bedroom with the boss’s daughter. Plus, you know, that Russian business.

The Washington Post report reveals that the Son-in-Law-in-Chief has memorized some key phrases from the CorpSpeak lexicon:

“We should have excellence in government,” Kushner said Sunday in an interview in his West Wing office. “The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.”

(Digression: “The citizens” are not, in fact, government’s “customers.” Citizens are more like government’s shareholders. You could even say we’re the bosses. And there is little empirical evidence that even “great American companies” are necessarily efficient; often they’re ridiculously wasteful. End of digression.)

What most piqued my interest in the Kushner story were the comparisons of the WHO-AI to “a SWAT team of internal consultants.” Why that particular acronym, I wondered?

SWAT unit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2014. Photo by Jonathan Wiggs via Boston Globe.

 

Word of the week: SCROTUS

In 1879, a telegraphic code book proposed SCOTUS as shorthand for “Supreme Court of the United States.” Ammon Shea, writing for the Merriam-Webster blog, traced the next -OTUS coinage to the 1890s, when telegraph operators began using POTUS to abbreviate “President of the United States.” Both acronyms became widespread, joined in the 1980s by FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States), which may have originated as Secret Service code for Nancy Reagan. “Time will tell if additional -OTUS words continue to join our language,” Shea concluded.

We didn’t have to wait long. In early February 2017, after President Trump lashed out at a “so-called judge” who halted his travel ban, SCROTUS began circulating widely on social media. This tweet appears to be the first to use the definition “So-Called Ruler of the United States.”

@jonathanalter ... SCROTUS stands for "So Called Ruler of the United States."

— Laura Sanders (@ViaDZine) February 4, 2017

On February 11, it entered the Urban Dictionary.

The coinage caught the attention of celebrities.

Overheard this new title for Trump: SCROTUS. The "So-Called Ruler of the United States."

— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) February 12, 2017

And at least one elected official.

DING, DING, DING! Here it is; THIS is what we've been looking for. pic.twitter.com/9tP5BIDJxh

— Sherry Frost (@frostnhstaterep) February 11, 2017

It even crossed the Atlantic.

Glad that McCain is speaking out on these matters. I heard a new one this weekend in England = SCROTUS So-called Ruler of The United States https://t.co/QjIJmUvBhB

— Mary Langford (@LangfordIEC) February 19, 2017

But the history of SCROTUS is older and more various – and dirtier – than the “so-called” acronym.

Name in the news: Altaba

It’s the end of an era for Yahoo – again.

If the deal goes through, Yahoo, the pioneer internet portal founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994, will be selling its core internet assets to Verizon for $4.8 billion. On Monday it was announced that what’s left – a 15 percent stake in the Chinese retail business Alibaba and the Yahoo Japan joint venture with Softbank – would be renamed Altaba. CEO Marissa Mayer and founder Filo will be leaving the board.

 

The old Yahoo billboard near the Bryant Street on-ramp to the westbound Bay Bridge. It went dark in 2011. Read my post about it.

A few strong words

Join me at Strong Language today, where I’ve published a post about a phrase in a sign that appeared on Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) last week. The sign was fake (but looked authentic); the phrase was an imperative that included a four-letter word that’s common in speech but uncommon in official pronouncements. I write about the phrase and its history – not very ancient, it turns out – and about GYST, the acronym formed from the phrase. Language-of-commerce connection: GYST is also the name of a couple of U.S. companies.

Too elliptical for you? Read the post.

Acronyms on the menu

Two signs in two restaurants, both in my general neighborhood in Oakland.

1. Choriz-O-M-G at Chipotle on Lakeshore Avenue.

 

Chipotle is also running a “BOGO” promotion – Buy One, Get One –for active, reserve, and retired members of the armed services.

For other commercial uses of OMG, see my 2012 post.

Word of the week: NEET

NEET: Acronym for “Not in Education, Employment or Training” – or, as Wall Street Journal contributor Nicholas Eberstadt put it in a September 1 op-ed, “Neither Employed nor in Education or Training”:

Labor Day is an appropriate moment to reflect on a quiet catastrophe: the collapse, over two generations, of work for American men. During the past half-century, work rates for U.S. males spiraled relentlessly downward. America is now home to a vast army of jobless men who are no longer even looking for work—roughly seven million of them age 25 to 54, the traditional prime of working life. … What do unworking men do with their free time? Sadly, not much that’s constructive. About a tenth are students trying to improve their circumstances. But the overwhelming majority are what the British call NEET: “neither employed nor in education or training.”

 

Name in the news: tronc

The press release arrived in inboxes Thursday afternoon, and within minutes it seemed everyone in media or branding was scoffing at it.

Tribune Publishing Co. (NYSE:TPUB) today announced that the Company will change its name to tronc, Inc., a content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels. tronc, or tribune online content, captures the essence of the Company’s mission. tronc pools the Company’s leading media brands and leverages innovative technology to deliver personalized and interactive experiences to its 60 million monthly users. The name change will become effective on June 20, 2016.

Yes, that’s tronc with a lower-case t, an acronym created from tribune online content. The ticker symbol will be TRNC. And the “engine” of all that “content curation and monetization” will be called troncX, because nothing says “innovative technology” like an “X” in the name.

Tribune Publishing Co., based in Chicago, owns some of the oldest and biggest surviving newspapers in the United States, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. The company, like the rest of the newspaper industry, has been struggling for years.

And now it faces yet another challenge: a storm of ridicule from journalists, brand consultants, and critical civilians.

Of course, negative response to a rebrand is to be expected. Indeed, most renaming announcements are met with jeers. (Everyone’s a critic.) For my part, I keep the Zajonc effect in mind: the tendency of people, after repeated exposure to something they initially disliked, to like the thing more over time. (Zajonc does not rhyme with “tronc”; it rhymes with “science.”)

But, ladies and gentlemen, I am fairly confident that years of exposure will not make me fall in love, or even in like, with tronc. It’s a word that sounds silly at best, ugly at worst, a rhyming cousin of honk, zonk, bonk, and honky-tonk. The lack of capitalization is ridiculous and impractical. (How will, say, the Chicago Tribune, a tronc property, treat the name at the beginning of a sentence?) And it’s a bad portmanteau, a Frankenname soldered together from a heartless DisruptionSpeak buzzword, “online content” (not to mention “premium, verified content”). The story that’s meant to justify it is blistered with other soulless buzzwords: “leverages,” “innovative,” “personalized,” “interactive experiences.”

No, there’s nothing but jonc in that tronc.