This Saturday, Jan. 30, is the birthday of our 32nd president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt - or "FDR," as he was and is commonly known. He was actually the first of our presidents whose initials alone were sufficient to identify the man in the mind of every citizen (like "JFK" and "LBJ" years later), and it is curious, I think, that three-letter designations played a particularly important role throughout his presidency.Roosevelt created scores of new federal agencies as part of his "New Deal," which was designed to pull the country out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. These agencies were commonly known by the initial letters in their names, so there was a virtual "alphabet soup" of programs and policies and bureaus and departments for people to digest during the Roosevelt years.
Designations such as the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.), NLRB (National Labor Relations Board), TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) and WPA (Works Progress Administration) were among dozens that were commonly known and used by people in place of the full name of each agency or program.
You will often hear designations like these being referred to as "acronyms" (AK-row-nimz), but they are not acronyms at all. Acronyms (from the Greek words for "extreme, or first" and "name") are indeed made from the initial letters in a phrase, but acronyms are actual words in their own right and are pronounced as words, not just as a series of individual letters.
Think about the way you pronounce the following: FBI, CIA, NATO, OPEC. The names of the first two are always spoken as letters, while the second two are always pronounced as whole words. NATO and OPEC are, therefore, examples of true acronyms, while FBI, CIA, TNT, DDT, AFL-CIO, and the "alphabet soup" of the New Deal are merely abbreviations or symbols.
Acronyms are a truly modern phenomenon in language, originating in this century with various military designations during the World War I. Since then, the military has contributed some of our most common acronyms, such as "radar" (Radio Detecting And Ranging), "scuba" (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus), "awol" (Absent Without Leave), and even "jeep," which comes from the sound made by pronouncing "GP," the first letters of "General Purpose" vehicle.
Our word "snafu," meaning a mistake or a confused situation, comes from the zeal with which soldiers and sailors in the Pacific theater during World War II carved and printed those letters on anything that didn't happen to be moving at the time, and those letters stood for "Situation Normal: All (Fouled) Up."
Acronyms are great fun for children to create for themselves and can serve as shorthand ways of voicing common family phrases, or as memory aids (the acronym HOMES, for example, is built from the initial letters of all five Great Lakes). Children, and adults as well, can learn to decipher the origins of many common acronyms by looking at the word origins that are given in brackets at the end of each definition in a desk-size or "collegiate" dictionary.
You'll be surprised to learn the meanings behind some common acronyms (try guessing the words from which CARE packages and ZIP codes were derived), and that certain trademarks, such as Qantas Airlines, Fiat automobiles, and even MiG fighter planes, are really acronyms. Why, there is even a country whose name was, in part, created to be an acronym (Pakistan).
Dr. William F. Russell's books for parents and children include "Classics to Read Aloud to Your Children" and "Classic Myths to Read Aloud." Send your questions and comments to him at Family Learning, 37 W 222, Route 64, Suite 203, St. Charles, IL 60175-1000.