MS NOW? My? Source? News? Opinion? World? As John Gruber says, it’s “a godawful backronym.”
It’s also a combination of an initialism and an acronym. There’s also CD-ROM, HIV/AIDS, MS-DOS. Any others? And any in which the acronym comes first?
[Bryan Garner: “An acronym is sounded as a word [UNESCO], while an initialism is pronounced letter by letter [HMO].”]
Friday, August 22, 2025
MS NOW, initialism and acronym
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I blame the British for inventing the term Radar back in the 1940's; I think those crazy Americans then took the idea of acronyms and ran with it.
There are acronyms that go further back (SCOTUS, to my surprise), but acronyms and initialisms do seem to go with American bizspeak. My least favorite: PQP, for Priorities, Quality, and Productivity, an initiative created by an insurance executive to eliminate degree programs at Illinois state schools.
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