I get three English words a day and one Spanish one in my email every morning
From today's "Word of the Day":
backronym (BAK-ro-nim) nounI wonder if there's a special word for words like "backronym," which are sort of puns, and sort of just annoying.
A word re-interpreted as an acronym.
[Compound of back + acronym.]
In a backronym, an expansion is invented to treat an existing word as an acronym. An example is the PERL programming language whose name is now explained as an acronym of Practical Extraction and Report Language.
When naming, sometimes a suitable name is chosen and then an acronym is retrofitted on top of it: USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism). The clunkiness of the expansion is a quick giveaway.
posted by JenIsFamous at 9/20/2005 09:51:00 AM
1 Comments:
Back in the 80's, a comedian named Rich Hall coined the term "sniglets" for words like this, although I think his term was also meant to encompass the more general category of any words that ought "by rights" be in the dictionary, but fail to, for some reason or another.
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