Do you know what an OVNI is? Even if you speak excellent French, you may not, unless I spell it out as an Object Volant Non Identifié: an Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO to those of us in the English-speaking world. And what, again, is a BD (pronounced bay-day)? It stands for bande dessinée—a comic strip, which in English has nothing to do with acronyms.
Acronyms in other languages resist translation because they put us at a double remove from meaning. To understand them, you need to know that they reference both something in the “real” world and something in the world of words: both the idea of an extraterrestrial flying object and the words conventionally used to describe such a thing. And neither point is obvious when someone talks to you in rapid French about what sounds like an ovnee.
Of course, even in other languages most acronyms are more obvious than these, and we tend to know what they mean even if we don’t know exactly what they stand for. For example, SCUBA = Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus; SNCF = Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français; RSVP = Répondez S’il Vous Plaît. But even if you didn’t know these word-for-word, it’s a fair bet you knew exactly what is meant by them. Sometimes, however, we may think we know what an acronym stands for but be quite mistaken.
This is the case with backronyms, which are acronyms retrospectively ascribed to words whose origins are quite different. Many people think that SOS stands for Save Our Ships, and this is a useful way of remembering it, but the letters in fact originate from their ease and clarity of transmission as a piece of Morse code (no words involved). The word posh, similarly, is often explained as deriving from the phrase Port Outward Starboard Home, but this is almost certainly untrue. And many people suggest that the wiki prefix found all over the web stands for What I Know Is - while it in fact derives from the Hawaiian word for “quick,” and has no acronymic origin.
And those of you with an insatiable lust for all things acronym can explore 565,000 more of the things here…
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