[Taxacom] Family acronyms are not acronyms but are abbreviations.

[Frederick W. Schueler]

Mario Blanco wrote:
> Hmm, so many (most?) herbarium "acronyms" are not really acronyms 
> either. Probably the same for many zoological museum "acronyms". (For 
> those unfamiliar with these terms, I am talking about the standard 
> abbreviations used to designate institutions).
> 
> Airports use the term "code" instead of "acronym", which is probably as 
> good as "abbreviation". However, I doubt that botanists will start using 
> the term "herbarium abbreviation" or "herbarium code". The term 
> "herbarium acronym" is too familiar already, at least among plant 
> taxonomists.

* TAXACOM has had this discussion before. I wonder if the use of 
"acronym" for these standardized notations for collections isn't 
long-standing enough to make this a legitimate meaning of "acronym."

I wonder also, whether these are not just abbreviations, but, as 
standardized symbols for the collections held by the institutions whose 
names they represent (and often former names that are no longer in use, 
or for institutions that don't exist any more), they're really "words," 
even if unpronounceable, and so "words made out of letters from an 
abbreviation," and thus acronyms.

Also "pronounceable" is a very slippery fish among scientists, who will 
eventually find a way to say even the most consonant-rich abbreviation 
as a word if it is widely used. Was "ROM" an abbreviation before 1970, 
but an acronym afterwards, when the inhabitants of Toronto responded to 
the ad campaign "ROM wasn't built in a day" and began to pronounce it as 
a syllable rather than as a series of letters?

fred.
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If we'd been meant to refer to species by made-up vernacular names,
God wouldn't have created Linnaeus!
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