From: charlie@umnstat.stat.umn.edu (Charles Geyer)
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: Apostrophes in Plural forms?
Date: 21 Nov 92 21:13:17 GMT
Organization: School of Statistics, University of Minnesota

> is (Roger Lustig) from article <1992Nov21.044912.8966@Princeton.EDU>

>> is me from article <1992Nov20.230208.5596@news2.cis.umn.edu>

>> Is a PCV valve (to use one of your own examples) more complicated than a
>> carburator or a butterfly valve?  No, but since it's new it gets a TLA.
>
> It certainly has a longer name when it's not abbreviated.

But this misses the whole point.  Why did things used to get expressive
names like "butterfly valve" and now get names like "positive crankcase
ventilation valve" (I hope I've got that right, but refuse to bother to
check), which doesn't bring any picture to mind and is hard to remember?

Does PCV valve suggest emission control to anyone who isn't a mechanic?

> No, the problem was that I didn't believe you.

Great.

> Well, van Leunen's example was intended to be journalistic.  I find
> problems with that approach.

Well, van Leunen's example was *clearly not* intended to be journalistic.
The title of her book is "A Handbook for Scholars".  No wonder you find
problems where none exist when you have no idea what's going on.

>> Roger, you have this amazingly panglossian view of the world.  Anything
>> people say, it is because that is the best of all possible ways to say it.
>
> *sigh* I get accused of this all the time; I think it's so much easier 
> than reading what I say.  
>
>> It never seems to enter your mind that people frequently continue to do
>> things out of sheer trendiness long after they have become totally
>> counterproductive.
>
> No, most people *don't* do things out of sheer trendiness.  They may do
> them out of habit -- but language is by its nature a habitual activity.
> As for the total counterproductiveness, I haven't heard of too many
> acronym-caused accidents.  Have you?  

Well I guess we have a fundamental disagreement.  Most people *do* do things
out of sheer trendiness.  Most bizspeak, entertainment speak, news, etc. is
little else but trendiness.

> NMR was invented well over 30 years ago; my father completed his dissertation
> on the subject in 1957.  It was called NMR then too.

In chemistry.  It wasn't introduced into medicine until the early '80s.

> I'm not sure what your point is about changing NMR to MRI -- initialism
> either way

It's that trendiness, again.

> (Actually, MRI is quite a bit more accurate!  The N doesn't mean much, as
> NMR is the only kind of magnetic resonance technique used in most places;
> and the I for Imaging indicates a new technology of the 80's.

Oh great!  "I for Imaging indicates a new technology of the 80's".  What
a great marketspeak phrase!  So all I have to do is end my TLA with an I
and I'm high-tech.  Right?  At least for a few years until it goes out of
fashion.

Actually the I is stupid because it makes "MRI image" a redundancy and
"MRI scan" almost a redundancy and incorrect besides, unless you think
"scan" is now a needless synonym for "image", for there is no scanning
involved.

> Actually, given the wave of scanning technology--CAT, PET, MRI -- some
> short, easily identifiable names, acronymic or not, were needed to keep
> confusion down.)

There's that "scanning" again.  And you've got one of the initialisms
wrong.  CAT is now also non-trendy, it's CT and has been for quite a few
years.  It's about time already that CT was declared non-trendy and something
else substituted.  Besides is there anything in these initialisms to suggest
that

  1. All three are forms of reconstruction tomography.  No.  Only two of
     the three have the T for "tomography".

  2. CT uses X-rays.  No.  No "X" anywhere in sight.

  3. PET is a nuclear medicine technique, which involves injection of
     radioisotopes into the body.

  4. MRI involves only putting the subject in a magnetic field, no
     X-rays or radioactivity.

So I seriously doubt that these initialisms are any more helpful to anyone
than if the methods were termed "foo", "bar", and "baz".

> Come to think of it, modern statistics has been blessed with one of the
> great coiners of words: John Tukey.  From bit through froot, flog, 
> biweight, and jackknife, he's come up with a good deal of non-acronymic
> jargon.  Of course, if you're not an insider and want to remember which
> is the bootstrap and which the jackknife, the words themselves will be
> of little use -- whereas an acronym (froot and bit are contractions, a
> whole different subject, though they include initials, too) will help
> out some if you can identify even one of its component letters.

Someone once said that even Tukey agrees that a lot of his ideas are crazy.
Nobody uses either the words "froot" and "flog" or the notions they designate.
The biweight is only one of many robust estimators and not a particularly
interesting one.  Tukey did coin "jackknife" and Efron (not Tukey) did
coin "bootstrap" following his lead.  But why you think these colorful
terms are *worse* than if the notions had been given TLA's is a mystery to
me.  The notion that they are hard to remember is simply bizarre.  It's like
saying people can't remember the difference between "shoe" and "glove" because
they aren't acronymic.  I've never met anyone who had any trouble remembering
the difference after they were exposed to both.

> Oh, come off it.  Nobody "tries to maximize initialisms."  This is 
> silly--imputing some preposterous intent to people whose style you
> don't like.

Oh, you come off it.  I've met quite a few novice authors who think that
an important part of making their writing look scientific is inventing
as many initialisms as possible.  I've met quite a few others who have
the notion that if there is an initialism, it must be used in every
place in which any reference is made to the notion designated by the
initialism or anything related to it.  "Maximizing initialisms" is not
a bad shorthand for the attitude.

-- 
Charles Geyer
School of Statistics
University of Minnesota
charlie@umnstat.stat.umn.edu
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english