Board minutes

[harrylamb]

IUPAC = International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. I thought everyone knew that

Harry Lamb.
Analytical Chemist

[Kevin Thurlow]

I'm obliged to Harry.

By the way,

"And then added a self-invented acronym as a gentle puzzle."

"FTAOD" is not an acronym, it is an abbreviation!

If it's any consolation, I had to persuade ISO and IUPAC to distinguish between "acronyms" and "abbreviated terms", and it took a while.

Oh, all right, "International Organization for Standardization".

But the Minutes were jolly interesting.

[Michael Farthing]

Ah! Not had any truck with them since they abolished cuprous and cupric!

[That was to Harry. Kevin interrupted me while I was posting, but forgiving that, please might he explain why my letters are an abbreviation and not an acronym? (though I suspect he has not decoded them)]

( I assume I can nest curved brackets within square ones?)

[IM Jack Rudd]

[That was to Harry. Kevin interrupted me while I was posting, but forgiving that, please might he explain why my letters are an abbreviation and not an acronym? (though I suspect he has not decoded them)]

Because an acronym is not just a set of initials, it's a set of initials that themselves make a word.

[Michael Farthing]

Ah yes, of course! Thanks Jack. I'm clearly losing it.

[Kevin Thurlow]

FTAOD

I assumed it was something like "F that arrogant old donkey", but I haven't worked out the "F" yet.

[Michael Farthing]

Regrettably I discover I am not its inventor. I googled it hoping that it would be a word in some obscure language and could thus still be claimed as an acronym. Sadly not so, but it does come up as an abbreviatiuon for the exact phrase I intended.

[Stewart Reuben]

A set of letters which are the first letters of each word of a phrase often develop into being an acronym. Thus nimby or NATO. FIDE was initially FIE. FIDE has become an acronym, but only in chess circles. News and posh are acronyms where the origin has been forgotten by most people.

[IM Jack Rudd]

News and posh are acronyms where the origin has been forgotten by most people.

I just checked a couple of etymology sites, and neither of those words appears to have started life as an acronym. (News started out as a plural noun that has mutated into a non-count noun, though.)

[NickFaulks]

Didn't know about news, but posh is Port Out Starboard Home.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Didn't know about news, but posh is Port Out Starboard Home.

A backronym?

[IM Jack Rudd]

Didn't know about news, but posh is Port Out Starboard Home.

I somewhat doubt that.

[Stewart Reuben]

It seems likely I was misled, as a child, about the etymology of news. Chambers suggests it goes back to the 15th century as new's, of the new.
The derivation of posh from rich people booking cabins on ships is confirmed by Chambers.

[NickFaulks]

I somewhat doubt that.

I don't. When I was a child I knew elderly people who had travelled regularly to India and they never doubted this. The arguments put in the article supposedly casting doubt on its plausibility are rubbish - it had nothing to do with the sun, but with being able to see Africa out of your porthole. Yes, in the better cabins you did get one.

Perhaps the term was already in currency for some other reason, but if so they didn't know that.

[Roger de Coverly]

I'm not sure that the ECF Board have decided anything in recent months that they don't want the world to know about (yet), or cannot agree amongst themselves what to say about what was decided, but it's now four months since their last minuted meeting.