Tag archives: initialism
5 words you didn’t know were acronyms
Sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day to say a whole word. That’s why the good British public have taken abbreviations to their hearts so willingly. Many people talk about ‘quotes’ instead of ‘quotations’, ‘info’ rather than ‘information’, ‘R-Patz’ in place of ‘Robert Pattinson’. . . yes? Anyone? And then there is the [...]
From ‘gadzooks’ to ‘cowabunga’: some episodes in the life of the interjection
OMG, LOL! When the Oxford English Dictionary decided to include the interjections LOL and OMG as new words in 2011, it seemed as though the apocalypse had finally come. From the tone of so many newspaper commentaries and angry blogs reacting to the news, I might have expected to have seen a few senior editors [...]
A plague of initials
There are always initials in the news, but it seems of late that we are suffering from a veritable plague of them (to borrow IMF, FIFA, BBC, NATO, PBS, and the NCAA. Most people probably don’t think too much about such abbreviations. If they do, it will be to classify them as different in some [...]
GTL, DTS, and T-shirt time: a look at Jersey Shore’s lingo
As a New Jersey native and self-confessed reality TV junkie, I enjoy watching the television show Jersey Shore, and recognizing some of the local vocabulary – terms like benny (a non-local who comes down to the Shore, usually used in a pejorative sense) and youse (an informal plural of ‘you’). The show also introduced me to [...]
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