Mind your language
OUR LIVES are measured out in acronyms. One frustrated reader even wrote to me recently to please tell her what aka meant and how it should be pronounced.
The word acronym comes, as one might expect, from America, wafting over to our shores in the 1940s. It is a perfectly respectable word, the first ele- ment coming from a Greek term mean- ing 'extremity' (as in Acropolis). Just as in Victorian times they made the writing of acrostics into a party game, so we in our own times pick at the extremities of words to make up new ones to describe the peculiar horrors we have invented.
Strictly speaking, an acronym should be pronounceable in its own right, as with radar or laser. These are now so assimilated into the language that it is not always easy to remember what the original building-blocks were. Radar used often to be spelled with a capital; Aids still is, though there seems no particular reason why it should be accorded this honorific. In Spain they call it Sida, just as they call Nato Otan, a suitably warlike denomination. Other foreign acronyms are generally too obscure for us English to unravel: Frelimo, Eta, Unita, and so on.
But it is the host of unpronounceable abbreviations that I find annoying. There was a spate of PVSs recently. It is not even as if anyone can decide what PVS stands for: 'Permanent Vegetative State' or 'Persistent Vegetative State'? More annoying still is the too frequent sentence: 'He was diagnosed PVS.' That is plain wrong. You can't say: 'He was diagnosed flu.'
Oh, and the reason that aka is so hard to analyse, if you happen to be one of the few not familiar with it, is that it stands for 'also known as', in which, of course the k is silent. Aka, I have always heard, is pronounced aykayay; if it were pronounced acka it would be a proper acronym after all.
Dot Wordsworth
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