Indulge me while I embrace the intentional open-endedness of the Nosillacast name to share some geeky fun from a different type of language to the ones I normally drone on about — human language!
In my school days, languages were by far my weakest subjects, and I’d go so far as to say I developed quite a dislike for the lot of them! But, in the decades since, I’ve come right around, and now I’ve become a bit of a logophile (word lover). Somehow, learning the very constrained and rigidly structured languages we use to command our computers helped me see the complexities and rich history in our quirky human languages in a whole new way. Those same inconsistencies and exceptions that once frustrated me now fascinate me!
Anyway, a recent XKCD comic (we’ll get to it near the end) got me thinking about one of my favourite group of word types, the names we give different types of names, or as I call them, the nym-words.
The nym word almost everyone knows best is the good old acronym. These are nouns made up of the initials of the words that make up their true longer names, and, that we pronounce as words rather than spell out. So things like NASA, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and RADAR, which is a little more stretched as it comes from RAdio Distance And Ranging. Strictly speaking the very similar nouns made up of letters we spell out like US and FBI are not acronyms but initialisms by the way.
While acronyms are cool, I much prefer their more playful cousins the so-called backronyms. These are acronyms whose long name is reverse engineered from the desired final acronym instead of the other way around. US law makers and scientists both love backronyms, with examples like the OWL Telescope, AKA the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, or the USA PATRIOT Act, AKA the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (seriously)!
Something I share with the podcasters Helen Zaltzman (from The Allusionist) and Roman Mars (from 99% Invisible) is a love of eponyms, or names for places and things derived from people’s names. (Their joint episode is a must-listen for anyone who loves words!)
I wonder how many of the American NosillaCastaways know Pennsylvania is named for its founder, William Penn?
More interestingly, silhouettes are named for a French aristocrat who notoriously hosted parties where his guests had shadow portraits made of them while the peasants around him starved to death. Perhaps a little ironically, he met his end at the sharp end of another eponym, the guillotine, named for its inventor, Dr. Guillotine, a medical doctor who actually disagreed with executions but wanted to at least make them as humane as possible for the victims.
You can probably guess that the element Curium is an eponym named for the physics and chemistry power-couple Marie & Pierre Curie, but neither of them actually discovered it. They did discover a different element though, Polonium, which is an example of a related nym word. Polonium is a toponym. That is to say, something named for a place. In the case of Polonium, it is named after Madame Curie’s beloved native Poland. Yes, many people think of her as French because she took her husband’s surname, but she was very much Polish.
That brings us neatly to another kind of nym word, the demonym, a name for a demography, or group of people. Most modern demonyms are pretty boring, usually just an -ish or an -ian ending. For example, two of my demonyms are Flemish and Belgian. I do find some of the Germanic demonyms rather fun, though. Did you know that someone from Luxembourg really is a Luxemburger, or that someone from Frankfurt really is a Frankfurter? But some of the older demonyms are just wonderfully anachronistic. Probably the weirdest of the common European ones is the demonym for people from the Netherlands — Dutch!
Geography brings me to a pair of nym words that can get me a little exercised, in the bad way. Geonyms are simply names for places, like America, Ireland or Belgium. But, the last of those three is not like the others, because it’s also an exonym, a name foreigners give a place. That’s what makes Belgium different to America and Ireland — Belgium is a name English-speaking outsiders give to a country the locals call by a few different names;België to the native Flemish speakers like myself, Belgique to the French speaking southern Belgians, and Belgien to the small community of German-speaking Belgians in the east of the country.
Most exonyms are not contentious, but some can be. For example, it doesn’t bother me at all that my home city, which I call Antwepen and the French Belgians call Anvers, is known to the English-speaking world by the exonym Antwerp. What does make me more than a little cranky is English speakers using French exonyms for decidedly Belgian cities like Brugge. Brugge is the capital of West Flanders. It is now, and has always been, a proudly Flemish city. And yet, English speakers insist on using its French exonym Bruges, perpetuating the oppression of the Flemish language by the French-speaking aristocracy that Flemish patriots like my grandfather fought so hard to overcome. What makes the use of Bruges all the more perplexing is that the nearby harbour of Zeebrugge is actually called Zeebrugge by English speakers, rather than the more logical but thankfully fictitious Sea Bruges!
OK — we need to cleanse our pallets after that, which brings me to the wonderful XKCD comic that inspired this whole lexicographic adventure — XKCD number 3075: “Anachronym Challenge”:
An anachronym is something still named for something that’s not true anymore — a kind of fossil word, or to be technical about it, an anachronistic noun!
So, the cartoon has a shopping list of things named for materials they’re not made of anymore — modern tinfoil is made of aluminium, modern sponges are plastic, not dried sponge plants, and so on.
There are lots of anachronisms in tech, of course, like the Save icon, which is an abstraction of a long obsolete 3 1/4” floppy disk, which was itself an anachronym, because it was not actually floppy anymore!
Tech also gives us a related nym word I only recently learned about, the retronym. These are new names we had to invent for old things when we replaced them with something newer. For example, before we invented the Electric Guitar, there was only the word Guitar for what we now have to call an Acoustic Guitar! Tell someone from even 1900 that you want to buy an acoustic guitar and they’d have no idea what you were on about!
But, I want to end by closing the loop right back to where we started with one last nym word, a homophone (a word that sounds the same as another) of an anachronym spelled with out the h, the anacronym, an acronym we forget is actually an acronym. I think the best example is scuba, which we’ve so thoroughly forgotten is an acronym from Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus that we don’t even capitalise it anymore! But that’s not the example I see offered most often to illustrate acronyms, that would be Radar, which I now usually see written with just a leading capital, which lets us end where we began and close our little lexicographical loop nicely 🙂
That was a really fun frolic in the logoverse. I have just one contention… the anachronism of a 3 1/2″ (not 3 1/4″) floppy disk is actually not. The disk is indeed floppy, just as its forebears were. Only the sleeve in which it is mounted changed. In the same vein, a vegetarian might be appalled to discover what a scotch egg is, or one might wonder how on earth our American friends make grilled cheese without ruining their ovens.