Why don’t we use telenyms?

You may remember some time ago when I came up with the term teleonym to refer to the phrase shortened by an acronym, and, in passing, invented (probably not for the first time in history), telenymy: the abbreviation of a phrase into a single word made up of the ends of the words in the phrase. For example, from the teleonym Hawaii Pacific University, we get the acronym HPU and the telenym ICY (which turns out to be amusingly inaccurate of the climate there, making for a convenient unplanned joke). But nobody ever uses telenyms. Why not?

We know it’s not because people don’t want to say “telenym” because it would be confused with “teleonym”, since (probably) nobody uses those words. Additionally, that argument would be silly.

I suspect that the main reason we don’t use telenyms is because they aren’t intuitive. The endings of words are not good cues to the words themselves – they are not as strongly associated as the start of words. For instance, if I want you to think of the word sugar, giving you SUG will probably make you think of it more easily than if I give you AR (where I suspect you would mainly leap to words like “car”, which rhyme with the non-word “ar” if you read it the way I do). If I gave you GAR that might help a little, but it might make it even harder. Of course, we would need to do an experiment to test this for sure (somebody probably already has), but I’m not even going to bother to check – in both writing and speech we have a lot of practice going from the start of a word to the whole word, but never from the end of a word to the whole word (by definition of “end of a word”, in fact).

If telenyms aren’t intuitive, they would be difficult to learn. With acronyms, you can often guess what they stand for quite easily before you have committed the teleonym to memory (for instance, “LOL” could only mean so many things in a given context), but with telenyms that isn’t the case. It is difficult to think of possible words based on their final letters – if you told a joke and I responded with “HTD” I think you would have some trouble guessing what I meant, even if you knew it was a telenym.

If things are difficult to learn, and something else – such as an acronym – fulfils the same role more learnably, then there is no reason for people to continue using the difficult behaviour.

Two final things I wanted to bring up: even if telenyms had at some point been used, a very good reason not to use them now is because nobody uses them and nobody is very good at using them. It would take practice and some amount of wider adoption before they even became worthwhile.

To summarise, I think we probably don’t use telenyms because they are unintuitive and impractical, though, like acronyms, at times amusing.

    • Josephine
    • December 24th, 2016

    • Cash Jackson
    • April 21st, 2017

    Why don’t we use telenymphs?

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