Ok let's fly she says this carpet's made for two

[venta]

Yesterday, I got an email from my mother with the subject line "language". This was not, in fact, a rebuke for having used a rude word in my LJ last week, but a message of bogglement at a phrase she'd read.

The email says:
---
There are plans afoot to make a unified something or other of Stockton and
Middlesbrough. The glossy brochure speaks of "the vision of the spectrum of
cityness".
---

Now, besides noting that she thinks it really ought to be "citiness" she is requesting any form of translation or, indeed, indication of what on earth it means.

Anyone interested in further linguo-nonsense should read on.

There is, or at least I thought there was, a well-known phrase or saying "to do something off your own bat", meaning, approximately, to get on and do it yourself, acting on your own initiative. Years back, I was faintly confused by my first boyfriend, who habitually talked about doing things "off your own back". Back ? Bat, surely. Though, on reflection, back might have made more sense. Unless it was a cricketing term.

Yesterday, secutatrix claimed to have done something on her own back.

So, I want to know which, if any, you'd use. Or any thoughts thereon.
[Poll #426565]

On the way home from work, onebyone and I were grumbling that Firefox doesn't do the Right and Proper Thing of displaying the alt text for a picture when you hover your mouse over the image. Further grumbling to wimble revealed why - there is now a title attribute which can be applied to images which should be displayed on hover-over, which Firefox correctly does (I just checked).

Wimble elaborated further that the title can be applied to all kinds of other elements, too - and mentioned one which I'd been very impressed to notice getting used over on huskyteer's journal the other day.

Now, watch carefully.

Here is a sample sentence from my journal: "DERT will be held in Preston this year."

Do you know what DERT is ? Probably not. So, try this sentence instead:

"DERT will be held in Preston this year."

Hover your mouse over DERT in the second example sentence - and all is revealed. Isn't that clever ?

Bear with me, this is all building up to a further linguo-query. Being thorough-minded types, Wimble and I went looking in the HTML spec. The acronym element, which I used up there, comes under Phrase Elements. As does the abbr element:

---
ABBR:
Indicates an abbreviated form (e.g., WWW, HTTP, URI, Mass., etc.).
ACRONYM:
Indicates an acronym (e.g., WAC, radar, etc.).
---

So, I wondered, what's the difference between an abbreviation and an acronym ? I'd have thought that WWW, HTTP etc were acronyms, not abbreviations. The only difference we could think of was that an acronym is required to be pronouncable (or at least pronounced).

Further on in the spec, however, it says:

---
The ABBR and ACRONYM elements allow authors to clearly indicate occurrences of abbreviations and acronyms. Western languages make extensive use of acronyms such as "GmbH", "NATO", and "F.B.I.", as well as abbreviations like "M.", "Inc.", "et al.", "etc.".
---

Er. Er. Does anyone pronounce FBI ? Fooby ? Even the Germans couldn't pronounce GmbH, surely ? (GmbH is an abbreviation of Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, and is an approximate equivalent of "ltd." after a company name, I think.) That looks far more to me like the split I expected, but it doesn't fit with the previous examples.

Later in the spec it says:

---
Note that abbreviations and acronyms often have idiosyncratic pronunciations. For example, while "IRS" and "BBC" are typically pronounced letter by letter, "NATO" and "UNESCO" are pronounced phonetically. Still other abbreviated forms (e.g., "URI" and "SQL") are spelled out by some people and pronounced as words by other people.
---

... so both abbreviations and acronyms can be pronounced. Which leaves me with the question not "what is the difference?" but "what on earth do W3C (the writers of the spec) think the difference is?"

And does anyone seriously pronounce URI ? Oori ? Yuri ?

Comments

[nja.livejournal.com]

I have a colleague who pronounces URL as "earl". I think of him as the Duke of Earl. He almost certainly doesn't know what a URI is, I suspect he'd pronounce it like the spoon-bender's first name if he did.

[zotz]

An acronym is, as it implies, the name of something, which an abbreviation isn't necessarily. I only really use it where it's pronounceable and used as if it's a word, but you could I suppose stretch it to the other cases plausibly.

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

I think "off your own bat" does have roots in cricket. I've certainly heard the phrase with bat, and not back. Maybe it's a Yorkshirism, cos Yorkshire has the best cricket team, obviously.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

<does anyone seriously pronounce URI ?

I've not encountered that, but I was once temporarily baffled in a conversation with someone who was talking about "earls" until I realised they mean "URLs", which I'd always heard pronounced as you-are-ells. IIRC it was in a fairly technical context about web standards, and I was further foxed by thinking they might have been on about EARL (Evaluation And Report Language) statements. Since then I've heard it quite a few times, from people who have a very techie day job, so it doesn't seem so strange any more (but it's still wrong IMO).

what on earth do W3C (the writers of the spec) think the difference is?

From my experience of the standards process, my guess is that different people in the working group had different ideas, and after many months of wrangling over details that actually affected implementations, the few that ever cared about making the difference between abbreviations and acronyms consistent in the document had lost the will to live.

[venta.livejournal.com]

What was I referring to?

Um, making ethical decisions (http://www.livejournal.com/users/secutatrix/34699.html?thread=364939#t364939) about Auschwitz, I think.

I don't have a mackerel problem.

Of course you don't, dear. A three-to-four tin-a-day mackerel habit is perfectly normal and nothing at all to worry about.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Duke, Duke, Duke
Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke,
Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke,
Duke of Earl...

<gets coat>

[venta.livejournal.com]

Phew. At least that meant it wasn't me who said that.

[triskellian]

secretrebel pronounces URL as 'earl' and gets very put out when I laugh at her for it. I shall try and remember to ask if she'd pronounce URI as 'yuri' or whatever ;-)

No clue about acronyms and abbreviations. I thought I knew how I defined them before you began, but now I'm so confused I can't even remember that!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Hover your mouse over DERT - and all is revealed. Isn't that clever ?

I'm sure you don't want to start all that nonsense again, do you ? Surely you remember what happened the first time ?! (Almost a year ago, eeep !)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Actually, I completely missed "all that nonsense" a year ago. And there was me thinking it was actually something I could use usefully :)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I always thought an acronym was something that is specific to the document, and the first time you use the term you write it out in full with the acronym in brackets and use the acronym for the rest of the document. An abbreviation is something that everybody knows already. I think it also relates to how you process it; an acronym is recognised by reading out the letters to yourself and then remembering what it means, but an abbreviation registers as a word in itself and goes image-->concept without necessarily stopping at reading the letters on the way.

I derive this empirically from reading things, and from the way I call something an acronym when I'm irritated at somebody for taking a perfectly good bit of everyday speech and making it sound like an answering machine being rewound.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I quite like that my browser adds a dotted underline to the acronymn text, so that I know there's something to see. "All that nonsense" was about creating easter eggs on web pages, and since only psychos like easter eggs, that's obviously a waste of time.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

The other possibility is that they're not intended to be mutually exclusive. For examples:

1) Dr - An abbreviation, but not an acronym.

2) WTF ? - An (acronym and an) abbreviation.

3) HTTP - An acronym (and an abbreviation).

So cases 1) and 2) I'd want to mark as abbreviations and case 3) as an acronym even though technically all acronyms are abbreviations.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

> the Right and Proper Thing of displaying the alt text for a picture when you hover your mouse over the image

Well, _alt_ is an _alternate_ text description for browsers that don't render the image.What you describe is an aswell tag :-)

Having said that, having little tool-tips pop up like you describe is jolly useful and I blatantly misuse the alt tag on my own web pages of photos for the family, such that "click to enlarge" or somesuch appears when you hover over a thumbnail, etc. Your top tip about the title tag appears to be what I need for Firefox etc.

[venta.livejournal.com]

What's your distinction between (2) and (3) ?

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Just for the record, in my mind "Dr" is pronounced "Doctor", "wtf" is pronounced "what the fuck", and "HTTP" is pronounced "aitch tee tee pee".

[venta.livejournal.com]

Aye, that's a fair point. Hadn't thought of it like that.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I blatantly misuse the alt tag

But that's evil, by definition of "blatantly misuse". My complaint about Firefox was that I thought it was just not displaying any tooltips, ever. As such I thought it was wasting a perfectly good opportunity to provide a handy developer function that would make it easy to check the alt tags on my images. Since alt tags are necessary if I want to be non-evil, they need a lot of checking.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

What's your distinction between (2) and (3) ?

That in the case of (2), the reader will need to mentally expand the phrase into its long form (well, unless they are familiar with it already), whereas with (3) you just use the thing as an atomic token which has a certain associated meaning which you will need to learn from scratch.

There are grey areas, of course. Something like FIFO, for example, is an atomic thingummy to me now, but when I first met it I would mentally expand it out and think about it for a bit (then get it wrong).

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

In fact, I'm inclined to dislike this "title" thing. Firstly, it's either misnamed or misused, because the expanded form of an acronym isn't it's "title". Secondly, it's abstracting a common user-agent operation (the tooltip) which is already used in another context, in a non-compatible way (afaik I can't do the equivalent of title=alt="Some text about this image"), so it usurps that use as has happened in Firefox. Finally, the end result of all this is that it's harder to write and check the usability functions of your page, which is a Really Bad Thing.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that an abbreviation is a shortened word or phrase (Mr, shouldn't, BBC) and an acronym is specifically the creation of a new word by this process (NATO). I think the HTML spec is very confused in its examples - although I don't agree with you that WWW is an acronym, for the reason that you pronounce the three letters in full.

Interestingly, this leads to the conclusion that I hadn't previously considered: that all acronyms are also abbreviations. And whilst the reverse is not necessarily true, one of my examples of an abbreviation - "shouldn't" - is actually also an acronym.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

its title

The OED he say...

[wimble.livejournal.com]

There are twelve citations within the OED for "off ... own bat" (the intervening word is usually "his", but "own" or "your" exist), and these are the only references to "own bat". So "on his own bat" is clearly a no-no.

There are 32 references to "own back", 3 of which are "on his own back" (referring to carrying things), and none of which follow off.

A proper corpora search would be better though, since these are merely the quotes that the OED is using.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

> 2) WTF ? - An (acronym and an) abbreviation.
> 3) HTTP - An acronym (and an abbreviation).

I disagree, because whether you mentally read these in full or as their letters (ie "What The Fuck" or "Double-you Tee Eff") neither case is a new word in its own right (see my post below). If case 2 was pronounced "wuttuff" then it would also be an acronym.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Having lived in Stockton, I'd say that both it and Middlesbrough are probably better avoided, so combining them and giving them a new city status would probably make it simpler for outsiders to be sure to take a suitable detour around the entire area...

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Maybe in some pedantic sense you are right, but I refuse to live in a world where TLA is not an acronym !

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

Abbreviation and Acronym both begin with A!

[ewx.livejournal.com]

People who use the alt attribute for 'tooltips' deserve to lose - it was never what it was for in the first place. title has been around for years and years.

I always understood an acronym to be a word made up of (usually but not always) initial letters, and an abbreviation to be any shortening.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Er... Middlesbrough's got a nice scale model of The Endeavour in a shopping centre. Stockton's got a good swimming pool. Er...

</clutching at straws>

Oh, OK, you win.

[venta.livejournal.com]

neither case is a new word in its own right

I'm not sure we all agree it has to be, though, that's just the definition you're using :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I always thought the A in TLA was for Abbreviation ?

The OED (again)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Oh, I might as well look up Acronym and Abbreviation:

Acronym

A word formed from the initial letters of other words. Hence as v. trans., to convert into an acronym

Abbreviation

A shortened form of a spoken word, or written symbol; a part of a word or symbol standing for the whole.

So ewx is correct. And, technically, so is the HTML spec: "GmbH", "NATO", and "F.B.I." are all the initial letters of their underlying terms, and therefore they're acronyms (as well as being abbreviations). Oddly, "M." (for Monsueir?") also fits this criteria, but is listed as an abbreviation. Maybe it's because of that other part of the definition: the initial letters have to form a word, which clearly excludes M. However that would also exclude, as venta originally comments, all of the other examples except NATO, WAC, RADAR and FIFO as none of the others are words.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

Indeed. That's merely the reason I disagree with the original assertion.

Hopefully we'll get this resolved - and I may well be incorrect. I'm certainly troubled by my conclusion that "shouldn't" is an acronym by my definition. In fact, www.dictionary.com seems to support the general premise that acronyms are "new" words, but discount the "shouldn't" case:

acronym: A word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women's Army Corps, or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as radar for radio detecting and ranging.

["shouldn't" being discounted because of the explicit requirement that initial letters form the new word.]

This definition of acronym seems to correspond to my understanding, but I'm not prepared to regard this website as the final authority!

[Is "WAC" a good example? I presume it is intended to be read as "whack" - but this isn't a known case to me, so I'd tend to read this as the three letters by default.]

And are we doing this one to death?!

Re: The OED (again)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Oh, just as a check, NATO is in the OED. GmbH isn't.

Whether that's an adequate definition of "a word" is another question.

And, just to complicate things, HTTP is listed under the entry for H. (Note: H is in the OED, and isn't a word. So just being in the OED doesn't imply that the sequence is a word.) URL has its own entry, and URI isn't mentioned at all!

Re: The OED (again)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Aha! What's the pronounciation guide for URL ?

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

The practical question is: does title work in MSIE as well as Firefox? If so, does title work in everything that is not pathologically unusual?

Chris in the Amalgamated Teesside Conurbation of Smoggieland

Re: The OED (again)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

"F.B.I." is certainly formed from initials, though I remain to be fully convinced that it's "a word"...

Re: The OED (again)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Damn: Opera doesn't copy the alt text...

Brit. /jurl/, /jul/, U.S. /jurl/

The screen shot is:

Which, in text form is:
{smm}ju{lm}{fata}r{sm}{ope}l/, /{smm}ju{lm}{fata}{lm}{sm}{ope}l/

Whatever that means!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

It can, but didn't originally.

As always, see Wikipedia for more detail than you could possibly want !

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

This is very much related to what I was talking about the other day in the staffroom. It's all very well defining a language based around semantic entities, but the trouble is that people always want more control than that in reality (qv. HTML, MIDP etc.).

Here, what you're asking for is "Can you please stop creating multiple semantic markups that map to the same behaviour (or replace old behaviour) on my client please ?". To which the answer is: "That's your client's problem !".

(Incidentally, I agree with you, I'm just providing extra backup for my earlier arguments !)

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

To which the answer is: "That's your client's problem !"

I agree with this. The question is whether the spec is posing an insurmountable problem. If it is, the spec is broken, regardless of the perverse view that it's none of the spec's business how or whether it is implemented.

In this case, the problem is not insurmountable (Firefox does provide a means to see the alt text, it's just not as convenient as mouse hover). This is why I'm "inclined to dislike" it, rather than claiming it's actually broken.

Who'd a thunk it ?

[venta.livejournal.com]

I've just remembered to look at today's page on The Calendar... as it turns out to be a list of "Chat Room Acronyms"

I'm pleased to say I'm familiar with virtually none of them :)

Re: The OED (again)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think the short answer there is "you pronounce it you-are-ell".

(And yes, I know, you're not, she (http://www.livejournal.com/users/elle_) is.)

Re: The OED (again)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Bad venta! No biscuit!

(You'll have to make do with beer instead, I guess!)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

It does!

I'm suprised!

Who'd have thunk it!

Re: The OED he say...

[pm215]

Google is the new corpus these days, you know :-)

"off * own back"   9210
"off * own bat"   10500

which is interestingly a lot closer than I'd have expected and a lot closer than the poll results... (and also quite low in absolute terms; certainly low enough not to run into the inaccuracies with high result counts.)

[(Anonymous)]

Anyone who expects Stockton and the Boro to agree to unite is somewhere well West of Planet Zog (and I've seen the artist's impressions of the vision of cityness) but the REAL (hidden) agenda is a "Tees Valley" conurbation, stretching from the coast to the far side of Darlington. They've already renamed our airport from Teesside to Durham Tees Valley (though not a lot of people, including Schipol, know that).

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

not a lot of people, including Schipol, know that

Can't blame 'em for that. The whole point of three-letter airport codes is so that other airports don't have to keep track of local politics.