A reader recently suggested a blog post about what he called “creative abbrevs,” the acronym imo (“in my opinion”) being his example. Varieties of texting shorthand live and die as fast as mayflies, but the comment did get me thinking about anacronyms. For the uninitiated, an anacronym is an acronym whose provenance has been lost to the shifting sands of language. They are to be distinguished from acronyms per se, but also from backronyms and initializations—all of which distinctions were lost on me until I started thinking about “abbrevs,” and in particular about one of my favorites, snafu.
Snafu was one of my very proper mother’s favorite words, and I recall being shocked when I learned that she knew its acronymic origin (“situation normal, all f—ed up”) and used it anyway. So did countless American publications beginning not long after its coinage in WWII….