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ANDY ROONEY
©2004 Tribune Media Services, Inc. A Few Words On Words During the hearings held by the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, one member, Richard Ben-Veniste, questioning Condoleezza Rice, kept referring to the "PDB." It was irritating. I felt dumb because I didn’t know what PDB stood for and he used it as if everyone should know. I’ve since found out it stands for "President’s Daily Brief." Now I know Ben-Ven-iste was dumber for using it than I was for not knowing the meaning. There are always people who try to make themselves sound special by using words familiar only to the people in their profession. Doctors do it, lawyers do it, scientists do it. There are hundreds of initials we use as shorthand without thinking of the words they represent. A newspaper using them doesn’t have to spell them out every time because we’re all fam-iliar with their meaning: USA, AFL-CIO, NATO, YMCA, AMA, FBI, CIA, OSS, AIDS, ROTC, PCB, USAAF, AP, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN. In many cases, it’s just more practical to use initials or acronyms. What road crew would plant a stick of trinitrotoluene under a rock? They’d use TNT. Acronyms and initials have been very handy and good if not abused. No one has to post a sign saying outside a movie playing "The Passion of the Christ" saying, "STANDING ROOM ONLY." All we need is "SRO." Some familiar initials turn into words called acronyms because you can pronounce them. The origin of the familiar "OK" is unclear but we say it as the acronym "okay." Other sets of initials don’t lend themselves to be-coming words. "RADAR" is an acronym so familiar that we don’t think of it as anything but a word. Originally it came from the com-bined first letters of some of the words in the phrase "Radio Detecting and Ranging." "SONAR" came from "Sound Navigation Ranging." "SCUBA" is short for "Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus." "BASIC" is an acronym in computer-talk that stands for "Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code." The acronym "MOUSE" refers not to a computer "mouse" but to a proposed "Minimum Orbital Unmanned Satel-lite of the Earth." The most familiar acronym to come out of World War II, which is still part of the language, was "SNAFU," which I won’t translate here. The sanitized version was, "Situation Normal All Foul-ed Up." "AWOL," meaning "Absent Without Leave," originated in World War I. The most unfortunate military acronym in World War II was "CINCUS," meaning "Commander in Chief of the United States Navy." It was pronounced, "Sink us." The federal government loves initials and acronyms. Franklin Roosevelt’s administration brought in hundreds like WPA, NRA, OPA. Even the name "Franklin Delano Roosevelt" is often replaced by the initials "FDR." John F. Kennedy was often called simply "JFK." Lyndon Johnson was "LBJ." It’s hard to know why that happens to some Presidents and not to others. It didn’t happen to Presidents before FDR and it didn’t happen to some of our most recent presidents. No one called Richard Milhous Nixon, "RMN." They didn’t call Jimmy Carter "JC" or Bill Clinton "BC." It may take three letters to give it the right ring. Big Business didn’t leave itself out of the initial and acronym business. We have words like "NABISCO" for "National Biscuit Company," "SUNOCO" for "Sun Oil Company," and "ALCOA," for the "Aluminum Cor-poration of America." "IBM" is familiar as a name but it’s not an acronym because you can’t pronounce it as a word. I have to get out of here PDQ. I hope the column is OK, pronounced as the acronym, "okay."
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