Abbreviations

IN daily life, we wade through abbreviations: DVD, IRD, DIY

. . . Committees would suffocate without them. Still, to the outsider’s eye they look like cowpats in a field. Today I explore the cowpats. To get us into the mood I’m abbreviating

abbreviation to abbrvn.

Abbrvn

Of course abbrvns are handy: the name means ‘‘shortening’’, and laboursaving tends to seem like a good idea. But is it? I’ll tell the story of my early life — my CV — in abbrvns.

My early life

I was born in 1939, just before WW2 began, and christened JKH. I remember little till the V2s fell on us, but quite soon it was VE Day then VJ Day. I went to school: CAIS then UCPS.

Then SABSB, assigned to class

L2 then U2. So that’s that, till at age 18 I went to university,

ChCh at OU. I read many books from OUP . . . And now, too, I read books from OUP as well, only now that’s Otago’s not Oxford’s University Press. The more use of abbrvns, the more possible duplication.

Troubles galore

Further trouble comes out of excessive or hasty abbrvn. No reader will recognise all my specimens. Abbrvn hinders understanding, by excluding. Rapidity of speech, and rapport with changing ingroups, won’t always outweigh the effect on outsiders, of gabbling and extrusion. Or at least we must judge — and PDQ — whether the dangers of exclusion are worth the value of inclusion, or indeed whether to exploit abbrvns for purposes of exclusion. (Like

PDLE [pas devant les enfants], ‘‘not in front of the children’’.)

Still

For the record, however, those early specimens mean a lot. When the V2s rained down on London, the children at Cedar Avenue Infants School would obey the airraid siren and scuttle across the playground to the yellow brick shelters. Once, I looked up at the sky, and saw a single plane up there. Whose was it, I wondered, as I scuttled across. The two endofwar street celebrations (VE, VJ) gave me a lifelong memory of extreme relief and joy, shared with neighbours; and wondering, Why isn’t life all like this?

Belonging

US campuses have it sussed. Freshmen seek to join a college

fraternity or sorority (Latinised names for brotherhood and sisterhood) and so will belong within a group which will ease

their study days — through clubbing it in the frathouse on campus. These often have a coded abbrvn, a set of Greek uppercased letters, likeOIBK (Phi Beta Kappa, short for

Philosophy is the Governor of

Life). Entry requires a very high GPA. On a visit to UCB I saw whole lines of frathouses along the campus streets, ‘‘continuous as the stars that shine/And twinkle on the Milky Way’’, each with its abbrvn in big Greek letters. At the least it teaches you the Greek alphabet.

Acronyms

To wordfanciers, acronyms hold more interest. Acronyms are a special kind of abbrvn, which does more than merely string initial letters together. They are abbrvns ‘‘spoken or used as if they are words in themselves. Often they are pronounced as words, like Nasa and radar’’. Sonar? But the distinction seems unclear: what about CV or CD or The Bee Gees, or BBC when it is sounded as ‘‘bibbisy’’ or becomes the Beeb?

So beware

Life is short, but abbrvns make it too much of a rush.

Challenge to DIY

Why not send me your own highspeed lifestory, using the highest possible percentage of abbrvns? RSVP, and TTFN.