Timeline for Is an acronym a word?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
21 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 23, 2018 at 20:43 | history | protected | MetaEd | ||
| Mar 8, 2014 at 11:16 | vote | accept | user67987 | ||
| Mar 6, 2014 at 21:37 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @David: I would not wish to work for a company paying good money (that should at least partly be going into my salary) for some twat to come up with a meaningless "word of the day" on a regular basis. Even if it did turn out later that one of these words was in fact the word of god. | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 21:08 | comment | added | David M | @Fumble Not a word yet. | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 21:02 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @David: Well they do say "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck" it's probably a good enough decoy to fool the real ducks if you're going hunting. Not being American, I don't have a gun (either for self-protection or duck-shooting), so I'd just wring its neck, pluck it and roast it. It's much like homeopathy or religion (or "money", at the ontological level) - if you believe it's real, it is real. But I'm not sure garp can really be a "real word" for me personally, since I've no idea what it's supposed to mean, and OED refuses to give any clues. | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 19:03 | comment | added | David M | @FumbleFingers closing as POB was my initial reaction, too. But, I decided that there was a rich enough fund of examples to make this question answerable without delving strictly into opinion. I believe I managed to represent that in my answer with perhaps one piece of opinion thrown in. | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 18:24 | review | Close votes | |||
| Mar 7, 2014 at 3:32 | |||||
| Mar 6, 2014 at 18:21 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @David: I can't be sure, no. But nor can anyone else. If you ask me, it might well have owed something to Pooh-Bah in G&S The Mikado. But it's all just idle speculation that has no bearing on current usage. Bear in mind that even if someone claims he actually invented the usage, he could be lying, exaggerating, or totally mistaken. And even if it could be proved that so-and-so first used a term with some reason in mind, that might be irrelevant to why other people adopted the usage (which is after all what counts). | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 18:17 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Anyway, I'm always up for closing questions of the general form "Is XXX an adverb?" in favour of What exactly is an “adverb”?. I'm starting to think someone should post the question What exactly is an “word”? just to accomdate this unending stream of POB questions. | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 18:17 | comment | added | David M | @FumbleFingers Are you sure that wasn't an attempt to shoehorn comedy into programming? | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 18:13 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @David: No no. The programming one isn't some kind of misspelling derived from that (hopelessly dated, imho) WW2 slang term (not so far as I'm concerned, at least). It's partly chosen (and definitely, survives), because we often use it in "compare & contrast" contexts - two functions foo() and bar(), for example. And in "function foo() calls function bar()", etc. | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 18:07 | comment | added | David M | @fumblefingers Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. If you're going to point to it as an example of an acronym turned word … otherwise, foobar is an acceptable derivative. I accept that spelling as an onomatopoeic rendering. | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 18:03 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @David: That really depends what you want it to mean. By far the most common usage in recent decades is the "function placeholder name", correctly spelled foobar. Personally, my most common usage is for the excellent Foobar audio player more fully known as Foobar2000. | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 17:46 | answer | added | David M | timeline score: 5 | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 17:38 | comment | added | David M | @ElliottFrisch Fubar not foobar. The u stands for up. | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 17:34 | review | First posts | |||
| Mar 6, 2014 at 18:43 | |||||
| Mar 6, 2014 at 17:33 | comment | added | WS2 | I believe it only qualifies as an acronym if it is used as a word. 'RADAR' is an acronym as we talk of 'radar'. But USA, or BBC are not acronyms because no one says them as though they were words. There is an extensive Wki article on acronyms which is very interesting: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 17:22 | answer | added | Cyberherbalist | timeline score: 0 | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 17:21 | answer | added | DisplayName | timeline score: 0 | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 17:18 | comment | added | Elliott Frisch | Sometimes. Snafu. Foobar. Zip code. | |
| Mar 6, 2014 at 17:17 | history | asked | user67987 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |