Pass the gin, I’m sinking in acronym soup

“Hendrick’s Gin unravels Five Unusual Mothering Techniques from the 19th Century until now”, the press release says at the top, and this is no joke: it mentions mothers who, a century ago, gave their infants a spoonful of sugar to keep them quiet. It speaks of outdoor nurseries and ice baths — eek. If my parents had given me ice baths at an early age, I’d have called it child abuse.

Anyway, one is unlikely to distrust headlines that appear to be in Huffington Post title caps. Or is it that Unusual Mothering Techniques (if you drop the “Five”) could become an acronym, as in UMTs?

The Hendrick’s Gin press release, oddly perhaps for an alcohol seller, does not mention what was probably the most popular form of UMT a century ago, which was to give the child a spoonful of brandy. And, if you didn’t have brandy, gin would surely do. It is attested by innumerable social-realist novels of the 19th century that this was a favoured form of practical parenting. In fact, it wasn’t very U at all, except in that “usual” also starts with U; it was just an MT.

Happy Mother’s Day, by the way, which is what the above nonsense is in aid of.

The word “acronym” comes from the Greek — acron = tip or end; onoma = name — so it’s as though it had taken the end, the front end as it were, of each name and compressed each end into a new name.

The acronym is much detested by subeditors on newspapers, perhaps because it is so beloved of government, civic organisations and NGOs (there we go again). These fervent users of the acronym, often the name of the organisation itself, naturally prefer their acronym to be all in capital letters.

At this esteemed organ, be it noted, we write any acronyms you can actually say in initial caps and then lower case, as in … er … Nehawu? Unless, of course, it’s shorter than four letters long, hence CIA, even though the Italians say “Cheeya” and, moreover, give it a definite article, as in la Chia.

We are certainly not able to cope with what the South African Liberated Public Sector Workers Union would like to call itself, which is SALIPSWU. I’m afraid that, if ever we have occasion to mention this union (it’s in the Saftu stable now, presumably), we’ll have to go with the upper and lower case.

I do believe that, in this, South Africa can once more claim a leadership position. The mere fact that we have the letters S and A to play with means we are very good at initialisms — the kind of acronym that takes the first few ends of words and gives us Saftu, Fedusa, Asgisa, Sedusa, and so on. Sars has more of a problem: South African Revenue Service or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome?

But let’s not go into government acronyms, which as we know proliferate wildly, as though they put a whole lot of letters of the alphabet into a darkened room and somehow induce them to copulate in unusual forms or reconnect themselves virally, perhaps, and give forth new, barely sayable offspring.

Certainly we are resisting “NDZ” as a usable acronym for Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, even in headlines. Doesn’t that stand for National Disaster Zone?