BEE: a sting in the tale?

Acronyms and abbreviations are the saviours of editors and subeditors around the world, because if every organisation’s name had to be spelt out in full every time it was mentioned, it would be much harder to reduce the word count of articles to make them fit the allotted print space.

That said, the proliferation of both acronyms and abbreviations has become a bit OTT, if you ask me.

OTT (over the top) is classed as an abbreviation, because the first letters of the phrase do not form a word that can be said, therefore the capitals are pronounced as “oh, tee, tee”. “Ott” just sounds weird, unless it’s a nickname for one’s pet otter.

In the case of acronyms which can easily be pronounced, only the first letter is capitalised. This is the norm in media style guides everywhere.

So, for example, the department of international relations & co-operation in South Africa is written as Dirco (which my spellcheck always insists on changing to Disco IDK). Similarly, in the US, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is known as Nasa.

When an abbreviation forms a word that is already a word, it reverts from a title-case acronym to all-capitals, as in the case of the South African Large Telescope (SALT) and black economic empowerment (BEE).

The extra Bs in broad-based BEE (B-BBEE) have never really caught on in colloquial use, which is why the writers interrogating the brouhaha caused by Eskom’s Mteto

Nyati (see page 24) refer only to BEE.

This, obviously, cannot be an acronym, because Bee is associated with a “stinging insect of the genus Apis, living in societies under a queen and producing wax and honey”, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, which also notes that the word “bee” has been “used metaphorically for ‘busy worker’ since the 1530s”.

Speaking of honey, New Yorker Andrew Coté, who happens to be in South Africa this week, is a fourth-generation beekeeper who tends hives all over the five boroughs (including some on the lawn of the UN complex) and sells myriad types of honey from his permanent stall in Union Square, Manhattan.

Coté used to be an English professor and is at pains to point out that “honey bee” should be two words rather than one, even though the erroneous portmanteau word “honeybee” is as prevalent as complaints about BEE.

In his book, Honey and Venom: Confessions of an Urban Beekeeper, Coté, (who, through his humanitarian upliftment organisation Bees Without Borders has acted as a beekeeping adviser in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania), quotes the 1956 book Anatomy of the Honey Bee, in which author Robert Snodgrass writes: “We have in entomology a rule for insect common names ... If the insect is what the name implies, write the two words separately, otherwise run them together.”

According to this rule, a house fly, which inhabits a house, becomes two words, whereas a dragonfly, which has nothing to do with dragons, becomes one word.

In the case of bees, Snodgrass says: “A honey bee is an insect and is pre-eminently a bee; ‘honeybee’ is equivalent to ‘Johnsmith’.”

So now you know. I’m not sure where Eric the Half-a-Bee figures in this equation but perhaps Monty Python fans have the answer.

Incidentally, the word “keeper” dates to the 1200s and originally meant “one who has charge of some person or thing”.

Some words don’t change much. Keepers of wickets entered the English vocabulary in the mid-1700s. The slang form of a partner worth keeping only arose in the 1990s.

I recall, as a younger cricket fan, how my female friends and I would go: “Ooooh, that Mark Boucher, he’s a keeper.” Alas, some things do change rather quickly.

Keepers like Boucher are in charge of making sure wickets don’t fall. The task of beekeepers is to maximise the harmony and productivity of hives full of busy workers, whence cometh sweet honey.

Bees Without Borders is evidence of widespread agreement among global beekeepers on how best to run things.

BEEkeepers, on the other hand, seem to be in disagreement of late. However they decide to maintain the hives henceforward, let’s hope for a result that sweetens everyone’s existence.