Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms

In the 1990s, I worked for the Ministry of Defense in Holland, and I probably don't need to tell you that the military are art masters of the abbreviation. To a grating extent, sometimes. I used to be employed at the medical supplies division. Even if you know the Dutch, it does take a little gnashing of the cogs upstairs to work out what GNKDGDN stands for.

However, you don't need the army to make a meal of an abbreviation. Quite often, the abbreviation is there to cut down on the number of seconds, spent writing out a big long word, e.g. exemplia gratia. We all write e.g., and we all know what it means. When we speak, the phrase turns into for example. 

A different form of contracting words or phrases consists of picking out the initial letters of the constituent words and putting them down as one word. The World Health Organisation is turned into WHO. Nobody will pronounce that as the interrogative who? Everybody spells out the individual letters in pronounciation. That is what you call an initialism. When the initial letters, put together, turn into a word that you can pronounce without causing confusion or difficulty, it is termed an acronym. Sometimes, additional letters are drawn in, added to initial letters, to make a pronounceable word. The word NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) is a case in point, as is SONAR (Sound Navigation And Ranging).

Wikipedia has an excellent article on this issue - the post was prompted by a letter in the Glasgow Herald of 12 October 2009.

So sorry, I'm too busy towing my cow!

Photo © Tristan Savatier - http://loupiote.com/ - Used by Permission

Beth and I have noticed a lot of "cow towing" going on in the blogosphere recently, and it really must stop.

First I read a blog that began by complaining that a highly-placed politician was cow towing to foreign interests. Most recently Beth had an anonymous commenter accuse this same highly-placed politician of "cowtowing (one word this time) to just about every socialist dictator in existence". And there were a few other instances in between those two where I saw the words cow tow. So we have decided that it is time to do a brief study of the correct spelling and use of the term kow tow.

Kowtow (also koutau or kautau) is from the Mandarin Chinese kòu tóu, and it means, literally, "to knock head." From my own research I found that the noun came into general use sometime between 1795 and 1805 and was the custom of touching one's forehead to the ground to show respect or submission -- to quite literally "knock" one's "head" on the ground.

The figurative use of the term as a verb came into use in 1826, and it is as that figurative use of "acting in an obsequious manner" (genuflect, scrape, bootlick, brownnose) that the recent blogger and anonymous commenter were trying to use the term. This is not a political blog, so I am not going to get into a discussion of their opinions or arguments, but I will say that because they (and the other examples I read) used the spelling cow tow, I have no idea what point they were really trying to make and remember nothing else that they wrote. When I first read the blog entry mentioned in my second paragraph I couldn't get past the words cow tow. I couldn't have taken the blogger seriously on anything else written in that entry. I even had to go to Beth's blog to re-read the Anonymous comment to get the quote used above because all I could remember about it was that Anonymous had spelled kowtow wrong.

(Side note to bloggers who want to be taken seriously on serious subjects: If you are trying to make a valid point to readers who may not share your opinions, please try to use correct usage and spelling if at all possible.)

I found the history of the cultural and religious use of kowtow very interesting. Britannica.com says that it was

"the act of supplication made by an inferior to his superior by kneeling and knocking his head to the floor. This prostration ceremony was most commonly used in religious worship, by commoners who came to make a request of the local district magistrate, and by officials and representatives of foreign powers who came into the presence of the emperor. By the Ming period (1368-1644), the ritual, especially as made to the shrine of Confucius by the emperor and to the emperor by his officials and foreign envoys, involved "three kneelings and nine prostrations."

And the difference between kneelings and prostrations? The three kneelings were done from a standing position, and the prostrations were kowtows performed while kneeling.

There were different grades of kowtow used depending on the situation. The emperor's subjects were required to kowtow to him as described above. Commoners were also required to kowtow to government officials since they represented the emperor, and if they were brought before an official in a formal situation they were required to remain kneeling. By contrast, a person with a degree in the "Imperial examinations" would be allowed to sit down after performing a kowtow. Children were required to kowtow to their elderly ancestors, especially on special occasions. It was even traditionally required that newly married couples kowtow to both sets of parents at their wedding ceremony, to acknowledge the debt owed to the parents for their nurturing.

The word kowtow came into English in the early 19th century and described the bow itself. Very soon, however, it came to mean any groveling or abject submission, and that is how it is usually used today. A recent BBC News article reported that the former president of Pakistan had accused the Afghan president of kow-towing to India.

In modern times the kowtow is still performed in Buddhist religious ceremonies. It is not known as kowtowing, however, but as "worship with the crown" (head) or "casting the five limbs to the earth". It has all but been replaced by the standing bow in social and formal situations today.

As far as I can find out, the term is most often spelled as one word, kowtow, but it is also acceptable to spell it as two words, kow tow, or with a hyphen, kow-tow. And the "tow" part is never pronounced like "toe", but like "cow".

In researching this word I found several interesting web sites, and also learned a lot about the May Fourth Movement. You may find this site of interest, and The Word Detective is always worth reading.

Many thanks to Tristan Savatier for use of the oh-so-appropriate photo above. I shouted with glee when I saw that photograph!

Coming soon another misunderstood and misused term we've noticed recently: toeing the line! Be sure to tune in for that one!

Whose blog is this, anyway?

If you enjoy words and word usage, it is your blog! Lori, Guido, and I may be the ones posting, but we share a love of language and have a mutual interest in a continued effort to improve and learn, and have some fun along the way.

My topic today is reflected in the title of this entry: who's vs. whose.

The apostrophe has been the topic here twice before: here and here. It's always worth repeating, because a misplaced apostrophe can change a well-intentioned phrase to nonsense.

Who's is a contraction of who is or who has. An appropriate use would be "Who's got the football?" or "Who's going with me to the football game?"

Whose is the possessive of who, and is used to show...well, possession. "Whose football is this?" or "Whose house are we watching the football game at?" (You could also say "At whose house are we watching the football game?" but that sounds a little stilted.)

As with other contractions, a good way to remember which is correct is to expand the contraction. In the first case, "Who has got the football?" makes sense. In the second case, "Who is football is this?" makes no sense whatsoever.

As for the score...who's counting?

I hate to say "I told you so"

Please note #5.

I'm not exaggerating!

At least not when it comes to the word literally.

I think we all see this word misused often; in the worst misuse, I've heard people say "Literately." [cringe]

The word means actually or without exaggeration. If you use it as merely an intensifier, you are probably misusing it. An example is "I was so angry, I literally saw red." Unless you actually had a crimson pall come across your vision, you didn't "literally" see red. However, if you say, "I was so angry that I burst a blood vessel in my eye; I literally saw red," that would be appropriate.

Make sure that if you use literally, you are presenting an accurate approximation of what really happened or what you really felt, without exaggeration. "Literally" is not meant to be used as a metaphor, but as a true representation of events or feelings.

And so on...and so on...

I tend to use etc. fairly often in my blog entries, but I am going to do my best to get away from it. Etc. is the abbreviation for the Latin et cetera, and is correctly written as two words, rather than one as shown in the picture; the Latin meaning is 'and others' and the English is 'and so on.' It is very easy to tack on an etc. to the end of listed items in a sentence, but my reading tells me that it is not considered "polished," and is sometimes thought to be used by writers who can't think of anything else to add. Ouch! As I thought about my use of it, I think it is probably fairly redundant. If I have a list of three or more items, is it necessary to add an etc.? If I can only think of one example to give, I need to think a little harder, don't I?

I can't say that I'll stop the use of etc. entirely (and I can't write et cetera without hearing Yul Brynner intone it in my head), but I am going to make a conscious effort to be more aware of my usage of the abbreviation, and try to ensure that I do not overuse it.

Caritas

More than a decade ago, I sang a piece by Maurice Duruflé called Ubi Caritas. How do you translate caritas? There's a challenge for you. Charity? Love? Friendship?

First of all, I have to refer to a letter in the Bible, the first from Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 13. Where it says "love", I have reason to believe that this was translated from the word caritas. What is love? Is it the love between man and wife, male and female? That is what we usually understand the word love to mean. Love, however, doesn't just cover the emotion that underpins a marital relationship. There is the love that a parent has towards a child. The love a child has towards its parent. More than that, love also exists outside family relations. There is friendship, a special branch of the tree of love, if you like.

Back to caritas. In some translations of the Bible (and don't start me off on that subject), it is translated as charity. Charity is usually understood to be the free gift of goods or money for the benefit of the less fortunate members of mankind. Particularly here in Stornoway, charity thrives. More than half a dozen charity shops, each working for a different organisation, e.g. the Red Cross, Blythswood, Breast Cancer support. the Lifeboat etc. But where does love come into that equation? The love of fellow man, I suppose. But a degree of doubt if not cynicism is creeping into my mind. Isn't it often the case that people give to charity to assuage their guilty conscience? Yes, I'm a cynic. Although it is a good thing to part with some of your worldly goods for the benefit of others, it is a distant member of the family of love. And often it is a case of seen to be doing good.

Ubi Caritas.
Love is everywhere.

I think it is eminently apt that we can't properly translate the word caritas. For it spans the whole spectrum of human emotion. I'll leave you with a performance I dug out of YouTube.