As children, we all learned that the word STOP on stop signs is an acronym. It means it’s time to “Spin Tires On Pavement”. Or was that just an urban legend?

There are quite a few urban legends centering on acronyms. I received an e-mail from a friend purporting to prove that shit is an acronym. Sorry; variations on that word are spread all across the Germanic language family. There is also a supposed acronym derived from Fornication Under Carnal Knowledge, but that seems a bit far fetched as well.

For a long time I was taken in by the urban legend surrounding posh. I first saw it authoritatively stated in a museum display in Shetland that posh stands for Port Out, Starboard Home, meaning that passengers with posh tickets got staterooms on the shady side both ways when P & O steamships traveled from England to India and back. John Ciardi’s A Browser’s Dictionary debunked that one.

Of course everyone knows that NASA is National Aeronautics and Space Administration, scuba is Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, and laser is Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

Jack Cover, inventor of the taser, named his device after the novel Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle (1911), with the “a” added to make it pronounceable. That sounds like an urban legend, but isn’t.

Heinlein didn’t invent tanstaafl (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) but he made it popular in his novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Wysiwyg (What You See Is What You Get, pronounced a bit like the name of Ebenezer Scrooge’s old boss) is one of my all time favorite acronyms. My first computer, a Mac SE, was part of a wysiwyg system. The screen had 72 pixels per inch and the matching printer was 72 dpi. Whatever you wrote or drew on the screen transferred to the page with absolute fidelity. Unfortunately, that also meant it was pixelated. As soon as crude bit-mapped fonts went the way of cave paintings, wysiwyg went away as well and it never really came back. When people use the term today, they actually mean “what you see is pretty darn close to what you get”.

I shouldn’t have to point out the difference between an acronym and an abbreviation, but since TV anchor persons no longer seem to know the difference, I will. Acronyms are pronounced as words; abbreviations are pronounced as letters. NASA is pronounced NASA, not N-A-S-A, making it an acronym. The USDA is pronounced U-S-D-A not youse dah, making it an abbreviation. An individual retirement account can be either, depending on whether you pronounce it I-R-A or IRA, like Ira Flatow.

Making up new acronyms can be fun. If you want to join with others in that pursuit, e-mail the United States Emergent Language Expression Society of Schenectady. Or not.

Sometimes the bad joke fairy takes over my keyboard. Sorry.