David Crystal - The Story of English in 100 Words

There are some interesting mixes of the two types. How do you say the word UFO ? Is it ‘you eff oh’ or ‘youfoh’? Both are possible. Similarly, some people pronounce internet FAQs as ‘eff eh cues’ and some as ‘facks’. LOL in internet and texting slang means ‘laughing out loud’: it’s pronounced either as ‘ell oh ell’ or as ‘loll’ ( §94). In American English, a VP (vice-president) is sometimes a ‘vee pee’ and sometimes a ‘veep’ — and the spelling veep is quite often seen in print these days.

But what does UFO mean? For most people, it is ‘unidentified flying object’. But for some it stands for ‘Ultralight Flight Organisation’. In the British military, it could be a ‘Unit Families Officer’. In physics it could be ‘universal fibre optic’. In computing, ‘user files online’. In medicine, an ‘unidentified foreign object’. In the events that take place in online fantasy worlds, it stands for ‘unwanted falling objects’. These are just some of the usages recorded in the dictionaries. There are at least twenty for UFO , and some acronyms have hundreds.

The ‘flying saucer’ sense of UFO , along with its ‘youfoh’ pronunciation, has allowed it to be the base for other words. In particular, the study of UFOs is called ufology and the students ufologists . Ufological and ufoish are also found. It’s unusual for an acronym to generate a family of words in this way.

Acronyms are not just for technical and business uses. Many occur in everyday speech, and have done for centuries — IOU (‘I owe you’) dates from the 17th century, as do NB , eg and pm , all derived from Latin words, though most people would be unable to say what the letters stand for ( nota bene ‘note well’, exempli gratia ‘for the sake of example’, post meridiem ‘after noon’). RIP (‘requiescat in pace’, conveniently also ‘rest in peace’) and RSVP (‘répondez s’il vous plaît’) date from the 19th century. During the 20th century we find such forms as ETA (‘estimated time of arrival’), FYI (‘for your information’) and ASAP (‘as soon as possible’). The internet has also introduced a large number of acronyms, some motivated by the need to keep words as short as possible in text-messaging and tweeting ( §92).

CD-ROM is an interesting mix, because it brings together an initialism ( CD ) and an acronym ( ROM ). The first part is sounded letter-by-letter, the second part is a whole word. Nobody would ever say ‘see dee ahr oh em’. Similarly, JPEG files are pronounced ‘jay peg’. Organisations which have three identical letters sometimes cheat: the American Automobile Association, or AAA , is often called Triple A . And IOU is unusual too, because it starts off as an acronym and ends up using a letter to replace a whole word. It should really be IOY .

On 17 June 1972 a group of men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington. The evidence of Republican political involvement, and the attempted cover-up, grew into a national scandal which led to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974.

The political fallout was great, but the linguistic fallout was longer-lasting. The -gate suffix became a permanent feature of the language, used by the media to refer to any actual or alleged scandal or cover-up, political or otherwise — especially one which leads to the downfall of the implicated person. It was a very convenient form, short and to the point. Perfect for headlines ( §88).

Most -gate words have a very short life, lasting only as long as a scandal remains news. Who now remembers what Baftagate was about in 1991? (A voting controversy surrounding the BAFTA film and television awards.) What was Camillagate ? (A tape-recording of an intimate telephone conversation between the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker-Bowles in 1992.) How long will BP-gate (from the 2010 oil-spill disaster) remain in the public domain? Or the repercussions of the Iraq War continue to be called Iraq-gate ? Only one thing is certain: other coinages are waiting in the wings to replace them.

Place-names quite often end up as everyday words in English, developing a more general meaning in the process. People talk about another Watergate , meaning ‘another scandal of the Watergate kind’. Governments and civil services become identified with their locations ( Whitehall, the White House ). Battles rarely make it into general use, with just a few exceptions, such as balaclava and armageddon . If you’re engaged in a decisive and final contest of some kind, you will meet your Waterloo . And there is the remarkable verb use of Trafalgar , attested since the late 19th century in the phrase Trafalgar Square — to subject someone to a soap-box tirade. ‘He just Trafalgar Squared me.’ It’s not common, but it’s there in the dictionary records.

Most place-names enter the general language in relation to products. We readily make new nouns out of wine locations, and some become so widely used that they lose their capital letter. ‘That’s a lovely Bordeaux. Have a glass of champagne.’ Other place-name drinks include martini, cognac, port, sherry and bourbon . The same applies to foodstuffs: Brie (cheese), Brussels (sprouts), Danish (pastries), hamburgers, frankfurters and sardines (from Sardinia). In the clothing world we find jeans, jerseys, bikinis, tuxedos and duffle coats .

But the process of making a word out of a place-name (a toponym ) is widespread. Tell someone a limerick? Drive in a limousine? Own an alsatian or a labrador? Play badminton or rugby? Run in a marathon? Dance the mazurka? You never quite know where a place-name is going to turn up.

In 1986, during the Australian ‘spycatcher’ trial, held to prevent the publication of a book by a former MI5 employee, the British cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, was asked by one of the lawyers to explain the difference between a misleading impression and a lie. ‘A lie is a straight untruth,’ he said. The lawyer suggested that a misleading impression, then, was ‘a sort of bent untruth’? Armstrong replied: ‘As one person said, it is perhaps being “economical with the truth”.’

He was referring to the 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke, who had once used the phrase ‘economy of truth’. But that usage didn’t enter the language in the way the new one did. To be economical with the truth came to be frequently quoted in the media and applied to other situations. It seems to have earned itself a permanent place in English idiom — one of the latest examples of doublespeak .

Doublespeak, or doubletalk, is a term known since the 1950s. It was prompted by George Orwell’s novel 1984 — a blend of his doublethink and newspeak . It describes any words which deliberately hide or change a meaning in order to achieve an ulterior motive. As the chair of the US Committee on Public Doublespeak said in 1973, it is language