Posts Tagged ‘ words ’

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.

2011
08/21
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What is the collective term for nieces and nephews?

“Nieces and nephews” is a cumbersome thing to say. When we want to say “brothers and sisters”, we can say “siblings” instead. When we want to say “mother and father” we can say “parents”. On top of being shorter, the other benefit to these things is that they are gender-neutral. Does “nieces and nephews” have an equivalent?

Well, I couldn’t find one. So I made one up.

“Adelpho-” is a Greek stem that tends to mean sibling. For instance, adelphogamy is a specifically brother-sister form of incest, and adelphophagy is one embryo prenatally consuming another. I just rammed this into the suffix “-geny”, which tends to mean origin or production (such as in “progeny”), and is also Greek, so bonus points for congruency.

Thus, we now have the term adelphogeny to refer collectively, and gender-neutrally, to nieces and nephews.

2011
07/23
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What is the opposite of an acronym?

Sometimes I find that I have constructed a sentence that requires me to use a word I don’t know. In this case, I wanted to refer to the phrase that an acronym is an acronym of. But what is the word for that? A google search led me to believe there isn’t a word for that, though I found out a couple of interesting things.

1) Apparently an acronym, according to most formal definitions, is for things that we say as words, like NATO and radar. In cases where we say the letters, like PVC and CIA, those are initialisms, not acronyms. Of course, there are some examples where it is mixed (like when people say “jpeg” like the letter “j” followed by the word “peg”), but what’s a definition without a few complications?

2) I had already heard of backronyms, but since they are kind of opposites for acronyms I thought I should mention them here. A backronym is when you take a word that already exists and come up with something for it to stand for. For example, I could take the word “fish” and make it a backronym for the Federation of Incredibly Stupid Horses. While this is an opposite for acronym in the sense of how an acronym is formed, it wasn’t the term I was looking for.

Because I couldn’t find the word I wanted, I decided to make one up. The prefix “acro-” is from a Greek word meaning “height, summit, tip”. I briefly considered “batho-” as an opposite, meaning deep/depth, and then “tele-“, meaning far/end, but I think “acro-” is probably used more for the tip part than the summit part (because an acronym is made from the first parts of the words in the [word I was looking for]), so decided against it. “Tele-” still sort of worked, but would indicate making a new word from the ends of the words in the bigger phrase (so instead of CIA we would have LEY). “Holo-” means whole, but a holonym is already a thing (to give an example, “body” is a holonym for “arm”). In the end I settled on “Teleo-“, meaning complete, which both made sense and was easy to find after I’d got to “tele-“.

So, if you ever find yourself in a situation where you want to use a single word to mean the complete phrase an acronym represents, we now have a word for it: teleonym. (Not to be confused with a telenym.)

2011
06/21
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