Does this really not confuse them?
The headline in the Grauniad newsletter reads:
China AidsEspecially with the hed broken across two lines like that, especially at 5:20 in the morning before me coffee, the meaning of the single upper-case A escapes me. It's not till I read the next line:
awakening
Quiet sexual revolution forces Beijing to admit dangers of virusthat I understand.
I know it's a Brit convention (rather newish, though to be honest I can't remember how new) to spell acronyms as though they were words - Nato, they write, for instance. But Aids?
I really thought this was some sort of cultural or historical piece - some "awakening" was underway assisted by China.
Spelling conventions have their place.
4 Comments:
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At 9:09 AM, April 18, 2008
Barry Leiba had this to say...
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At 2:13 PM, April 18, 2008
Anonymous had this to say...
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At 2:14 PM, April 18, 2008
fev had this to say...
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At 9:22 AM, April 19, 2008
Barry Leiba had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->It probably does confuse them, but they don't care.
We've adopted a number of acronyms into the language, and have long spelt them (and considered them) as words, even in American. Some that come to mind include laser, radar, scuba, flak (from German), and gulag (from Russian), and many people don't even know they are (or were) acronyms.
So maybe it's just that the Brits have a lower threshold for making an acronym into a "word". In any case, yeah, I agree that when it's already another word, one needs to make an exception. Maybe we should use the Spanish version: SIDA.
I'm reminded of a similar tendency in the computer field, where some of us still hold out for FORTRAN, BASIC, and COBOL (but Pascal, Ada, and Java; they're not acronyms). It's very common to see "Fortran" and "Cobol". (I suppose they really ought to be "ForTran" and "CoBOL", but we've not tended to do that to acronyms.)
Acronyms can also be really dependent on house style and other vagaries of news practice. If I recall it right, the NYT's cutoff point is five letters, so "AIDS" remains all-cap but "Nascar" is up-and-down. AP caps NASCAR but not Nasdaq (the latter, I'm inferring, on grounds that it's no longer an acronym).
Here's the Grauniad style:
"Use all capitals if an abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters: BBC, VAT etc; if it is an acronym (pronounced as a word) spell out with initial capital, eg Nasa, Nato, unless it can be considered to have entered the language as an everyday word, such as awol, laser and, more recently, asbo, pin number and sim card."
For real fun, you can find a copy of the Guardian's 1928 stylebook at http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2003/10/22/1928Styleguide.pdf
All stylebooks are social constructs; the Guardian is unusually frank about acknowledging that, rather than pretending that "style" is something objective handed down from Mount Sinai. But that's another, like, 18 million posts...
Apologies -- didn't mean to sign in "anonymous." That was me.
NASDAQ/Nasdaq is a funny one, because it's actually a company, so we should spell it the way they do, however odd that might be (I always use "Yahoo!", for example, with the exclamation point). Only, they're inconsistent on their own web site (in the text, not just the logos, which is a different thing), sometimes using "NASDAQ" and sometimes "Nasdaq".
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