I was a prerecorded guest yesterday morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, chatting with the charming Scott Simon about the origins of the word “deadline,” and I thought it might amuse you to, if you haven’t already heard the segment, hear the segment, which you can do right here.
Scott and I had also discussed, briefly, the origins of “tariff,” though that part of our conversation didn’t make the final cut. For the record, the word can be tracked back through French, Italian, Turkish, Persian, and, ultimately, to Arabic, whence it derives from a verb meaning “to know, to recognize, to find out,” which nugget of information afforded me the opportunity to gingerly introduce Scott to the initialism1 FAFO.
“Can you not say?”
“Well, the FO part is ‘find out.’”
“Yes?”
“And the A is ‘around.’…”
“Oh!”
And that’s that for today. Happy Sunday to all who observe.
Cover photograph: George W. Ackerman, “A farm family listening to their radio” (probably taken in Ingham County, Michigan, August 15, 1930) (National Archives and Records Administration)
Though some people refer to any conglomeration of initial letters pressed together as an acronym, I prefer to reserve that term for the conglomerations you can pronounce as words, like NATO and NASA and UNICEF and, long since accepted and transformed generically, radar, laser, and scuba. The ones whose letters you sound out individually, like FAFO, to say nothing of FBI and CIA, are initialisms.
To paraphrase the late great Huddie Ledbetter:
“Oh, boys, can’t you line ‘em, jack-a-lack
“Oh boys, can’t you line ‘em, jack-a-lack
“Oh boys, can’t you (dead) line ‘em, that radio track!”
I too abhor the use of "acronym" for something that is not pronounced (or pronounceable) as a word, though I have always called such things as "FBI" abbreviations. But initialisms as a subset of abbreviations will be a good word for me to adopt here on out.