Sometime Sunday afternoon, a bad mood hit, and it seems to have spilled into Monday. It’s making me get really testy about innocuous things, like the meeting we had at work this morning to discuss some new computer stuff. Before we can go live with the new program, we have to find a way to collect some Personal Identification Numbers and put them into a spreadsheet. As we were brainstorming the best way to do this, I my mood was being tested and pushed to the brink of irrationality by the way my co-workers kept saying “PIN Number.”
The lovely Poppy award winning Stefanie, who is a grammatical inspiration to us all, was recently discussing the oh-so common misuse of apostrophes and quotation marks, which on a day like today can also drive me to madness. Goodness forbid I start carrying around a Sharpie at all times, because I will most likely deface every sign I see advertising “Avacado’s $1.00″ or every menu I see touting the “Special ‘fresh’ catch.”
But the thing that I get really irrationally worked up about is incorrect use of the acronym. A few years ago, I decided this misuse was prevalent enough to deserve a name, and I came up with the term EXTRANYM.
The definition: the addition of the final word of an acronym to the end of an acronym.
Examples:
PIN Number
TCBY Yogurt
HIV Virus
SCUBA Apparatus
ATM Machine – you often see this one in PRINT!!!
ISBN Number
If you break it down, when you repeat the last word of an acronym, what you’re really saying is “Personal Identification Number Number” or “Automatic Teller Machine Machine.” It makes no sense!
As I side note, also dislike the confusion caused by pluralizing an acronym. I’m pretty sure the MLA correct way is to use an apostrophe, even though it seems to qualify you for the misuse of apostrophe club. For instance, if you have more than one compact disk, you have 2 CD’s, which is not to say that the CD possesses something, but it is to say that the apostrophe stands in for the missing letters of “Disk.” I much prefer the look of “CDs” but this is incorrect, because “CD” is not a word in itself, it is an abbreviation.
But I digress. When I came up with this word a few years ago, I remember telling a friend that I wished there was some kind of forum where I could vent my brilliant ideas to share them with the world. Then, viola, along comes the blogosphere. Now, a year after I started blogging, I can’t believe it took me until today to realize that the time was nigh to let everybody know about this national issue. Please, tell your friends, and let’s see if we can put a stop to this. At the very least, it may improve my mood and my next company meeting.
Are there any other common extranyms you’ve seen?
