It’s all in the letters...
AQUESTION once very popular in pub quizzes is what does “Cobra” committee stand for. The answer is “Cabinet Office Briefing Room A”. You get extra points for adding that there allegedly isn’t a Briefing Room B at present.
Anyway, I was at this quiz one time when the host giving the answer to that poser unwisely described it as an “abbreviation”.
Big mistake on his part. More than half the room shouted out “acronym”, followed by a few choice expletives. Quiz-goers can be like that.
As they’ll tell you, an abbreviation is a truncated word. For example, saying “celeb” instead of celebrity or “email” to refer to electronic mail.
On the other hand, an acronym is when an abbreviation is formed to make a shortened word from a longer name. For instance, you have Covid (Corona Virus Disease), Aids (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) or Nasa (National Aeronautics and Space Administration).
This is of course different to an initialism which is an acronym that is pronounced as individual letters like UN, UK, DNA, BBC or OCD. You keeping up with this so far?
Social media has done its bit to extend the practice by slipping comments into the language like BTW, LOL, IMO and OMG.
Some acronyms are a bit outdated, like Quango – Quasi-autonomous Non-governmental Organisation. Others are specialist in nature, such as Raptor – Relatively Affluent Pensioner Or Retiree.
Others are just outlandish. Did you know that the Captcha test, which asks you to tick sections of an image to confirm you are not a robot stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”?
Before you go thinking that this is an exclusively modern trend, you might be surprised to learn that the Romans were big on abbreviations, so to speak. Many Latin inscriptions utilise a form of shorthand.
One surviving example can be found on modern UK coinage. You’ll find the expression “FID DEF” imprinted on the edge. This stands for Fidelis Defensor (Defender of the Faith), an accolade bestowed on Henry VIII by the Pope – before the Reformation.
OK, I think you’ve got enough to consider yourself quiz-ready now. Get in there.