Acro II
Bill Long
Just the "Tip" of the Iceberg
There are a few words beginning with acro that seem synonymous or similar enough to other words beginning with acro to group them together in pairs. Two such pairs will occupy my attention on this page and one on the next.
Acronym/Acrostic
These phenomena are actually quite different but they both have to do with manipulation of letters to form words. Almost everyone knows what an acronym is: a word formed from the initial letters of another word or words. So, the TV show "MASH" was a show about the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. "Nabisco" crackers are made by the National Biscuit Company. What was significant to me upon studying this word was not the meaning of acronym but the fact that the first OED attribution is only from 1943. I don't know why I felt the word was ancient. It certainly is not. I mused that my dad (born in 1925) didn't even grown up on acronyms or, if he did, he didn't know what to call them. Maybe that was why he was grumpy with me a lot.
An acrostic (the Greek word stichos means "row" or "line of verse") is either a short poem in which the initial letters of the lines spell a word [there can be much more complex acrostics, but this brief definition should suffice] or, and this is the way I originally learned it, "a Hebrew poem in which the consecutive lines or verses begin with the successive letters of the alphabet." This kind of poem is also known as an abecedarian poem (you can see the a-b-c-d in it), and the most famous Scriptural acrostic is Psalm 119, where each of the 22 stanzas of 8 verses begins with a successive Hebrew letter.
Acrologic/Acrophony
This concept is more difficult, but I think these words are meant to be synonymous. The terms were invented in the 19th century, in the first rush of excitement caused by Western discovery of hierolyphics and the Sumerian/Akkadian language. The former, acrologic, is used only rarely and is only defined by the OED as "pertaining to, or founded upon, initials." That is certainly the expected definition, but it really doesn't communication anything.* So, I held it the definition in my
[*Another instance of an acro word where the OED gives a definition that is not very illuminating is acrotomous. The OED defines the term as "having a cleavage parallel to the base." Well, when I, in my male mind, think of cleavages, I don't think of what the word "cleavage" in this definition is supposed to suggest. Acrotomous is derived from the study of rocks and minerals, and the cleavage it speaks about are the structural lines along which a mineral will break up when subjected to pressure. Now the definition makes sense. The "fault lines" of the rock are parallel to the base line of the rock. I wish the OED had told me this. As the Emerald City Gatekeeper says in the Wizard of Oz, "Why didn't you say so in the fuist place?"]
mind and advanced to acrophony, which is the "sound of the initial." But then the OED goes on to say, "the use of what was originally a picture-symbol or hieroglyph of an object to represent phonetically the initial syllable or sound of the name of the object." Phew.
Ok. I want to comment on this. First, to explain. When I studied the Ancient Near East several decades ago, I was told that the way ANE languages evolved was from pictographic to ideographic to phonetic script. That is, first they had pictures to represent concepts, and then the picture suggested an idea, perhaps the "d" sound in "door," and then finally the language would drop the picture and just use the letter "d." I am sure I am butchering someone's account from long ago, but that is how I understood it.
My question: was this the way that languages developed in fact and do we have any information one way or the other to confirm it? It seems to smell of a rather simplistic teleological or evolutionary view of language that may have nothing to do with historical fact. But, leaving this question/objection aside, the process of collapsing the picture to the letter is called acrophony.
If we kept the definition of acrophony confined in this way, it wouldn't help us much, since English is not a language which is acrophonic. But if we focus on the root meaning of the term, "the 'highest' sound" (meaning the initial sound), we can perhaps relate it to a common practice at least in America relating to initial sounds of words.
Before online hotel reservations were common, I had the experience numerous times of making phone reservations and being given a "confirmation number." For the Ramada Inn, for example, I was given about at 12 digit/letter combination, regardless of the fact that it seemed like Ramada could never have had more than 5 figures of guests in a few decades. Nevertheless I would usually mishear a "b" as a "d" or an "m" as an "n." Sooner or later someone decided to use the word "Bob" for "b" and "Mom" for "m," so that my number could have been 12345Mom89012. I would propose that the process by which we make a letter into a word beginning with that letter for sake of clarity be called acrophony. It would be a wonderful shorthand way, consistent with the meaning of the Greek language, of designating a familiar phenomenon with just one word.
I will need one more essay before we can let go of acro.
Copyright © 2004-2007 William R. Long |