2021-04-06
ศัพท์ น่าสับสน ชุด – A – acronyms & apostrophes
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Dictionary.com
ออกเสียง acronyms = ‘AK-ruh-nim’
ออกเสียง apostrophes = ‘uh-POS-truh-fee’
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language,
Acronym
Usage Note:
In strict usage,
the term acronym refers to a word
made from the initial lettersor parts of other words,
such as sonar from so(und) na(vigation and) r(anging).
The distinguishing feature of an acronym is that
it is pronounced as if it were a single word,
in the manner of NATO and NASA.
Acronymsare often distinguished from initialisms
like FBI and NIH,
whose individual letters are pronounced as separate syllables.
While observing this distinction has some virtue in precision,
it may be lost on many people, for whom the term
acronym refers to both kinds of abbreviations.
Farlex Trivia Dictionary
initialism, alphabetism, acronym
Initialisms(sometimes called alphabetisms)
are formedfrom the initial letters of a string of words
and are pronounced as a sequence of letters,
e.g. BYOB, USA, DVD.
Acronymsare formed from
the initial letters or parts of words in a sequence,
but have the distinction of being pronounceable words,
e.g. RADAR, SCUBA.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Frequently Asked Questions About acronym
What is the differencebetween an acronym and an initialism?
Both acronymsand initialisms are
made up ofthe first letter or letters of the words in a phrase.
The word acronym typically applies
when theresulting thing can be read as a word;
for example, radar comes from "radio detection and ranging"
and scuba comes from "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus."
The word initialism only applies
whenthe resulting thing is read as an abbreviation;
for example DIY,which comes from "do it yourself,"
is pronouncedby saying the names of the letters.
Note that
the word acronym is also sometimes used to mean "initialism."
What is the difference betweenan acronym and an abbreviation?
An acronymis a kind of abbreviation.
Abbreviationscan be shortened forms of any kind.
For example, appt is an abbreviation of appointment,
and ASAP is an abbreviation of as soon as possible.
ASAP,however, also qualifies as an acronym
because it is made up of the initial letters of the phrase
it comes from: as soon as possible.
Is OK an acronym?
OK is technically an acronym.
It comes fromthe phrase "oll korrect,"
a humorous alterationof "all correct."
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Words at Play
What's an Initialism?
'UNICEF'is an acronym. 'ACLU' is an initialism. Why?
Wordsare made up of letters,
but a group of lettersdoesn’t necessarily become a word.
Think of FBI or HMO or TSA or TGIF
—perfectly common expressionsthat we encounter every day,
but no one would call them words.
They are commonly called acronyms,
but there’sa more specific term that’s used by linguists
and people who like being preciseabout these things: initialism.
Acronymslike 'scuba' ("self-contained underwater breathing apparatus") are pronounceable as words. Initialisms like 'FBI' are not.
The confusion starts when we pronounce
the letters of these abbreviations like a word, like NATO.
The definition of acronym,
“a word formed fromthe initial letter or letters
of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term,”
meansthat acronyms can be differentiated from other abbreviations
because they are pronounceable as words.
Some acronymsare spoken so frequently that
we beginto think of them as words,
like radar (radio detection and ranging),
scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), and
laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation).
Other common acronymsare ASCII, UNICEF, DARPA,
and the governmental terms POTUS, FLOTUS, and SCOTUS.
An initialism is an abbreviation formed from initial letters.
Our online dictionary has entries for some 1500 abbreviations
that use only capital letters,
like ACLU, BBQ, CPR, DIY, POV, PTSD, and YMCA.
Acronym is a relatively new word made up of ancient parts.
It enteredthe language around 1940, made from the Greek word akros, meaning “topmost” or “highest,” combined with -onym, from the Greek word onyma (“name” or “word”).
In German, the term Akronym had been used since the 1920s.
Initialism is the older term, dating to the mid-1800s.
Some initialisms become acronyms by virtue of being spoken out loud
frequently enoughto become more like a word than a set of letters:
both ASAP and LOL are frequently pronounced as words.
Some are only partially pronounced, like HVAC.
Acronyms formed from the first parts of words
(rather than just the initial letters)
tend to become wordsthemselves,
like hazmat (hazardous materials)
and motel (motor hotel).
These aresometimes called blends by linguists,
and arguments about
whether the new word was formed from initial letters
or blended word parts enter the realm of the philosophical.
Finally, some words are formed from spelling out
or rendering pronounceable their initials,
like emcee (MC) and seabee (construction battalion).
Because it’s frequently used to mean both kinds of abbreviations,
a second definition of acronym reads,
“also: an abbreviation (as FBI) formed from initial letters.”
Which is a synonym of initialism, FYI.
Dictionary.com
What Is A Literary Apostrophe?
When you hear apostrophe, you probably think of this symbol: ’, right? Well, today, we’re actually talking about the literary device,
which is completely different.
A literary apostrophe is
“when a speaker addresses an absent party as if they were present.”
Why do we use apostrophes in literature?
Literary apostrophesare great for conveying emotion.
They allow the speaker more expression
and offer a better view of their inner thoughts and feelings.
Apostrophes in literature were used a lot in the early 1900s and before, but today they’re much less common.
Sometimesyou’ll still see them in poems, plays, and songs.
You’ve definitely heard them in everyday speech.
What is the formatof literary apostrophe?
The purposeof an apostrophe in literature
is to direct the reader’s attention to something
other than the person who’s speaking.
Apostrophes frequently target an absent person or a third party.
Other times, they focus on an inanimate object, a place, or even an abstract idea.
They’ll often begin with an exclamation.
This may be a sound, like O!
It could also be the name of the thingthe speaker’s addressing.
Take this examplefrom a poem by Emily Dickinson:
GOOD night! which put the candle out?
A jealous zephyr, not a doubt.
Ah! friend, you little knew
How long at that celestial wick
The angels labored diligent;
Extinguished, now, for you!
At the start of this stanza,
Dickinson addresses the night by exclaiming its name.
She asks what blew out the candle,
and then decides it was a zephyr (or a small breeze).
The next line starts a new apostrophe with Ah!
This one is addressed to friend, which refers to the zephyr.
Dickinson then ends the poem by talking to the breeze about the extinguished candle.
Apostrophe to an absent person
Sometimes apostrophes address an absent person or people.
One exampleis the song
“Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” from the musical Les Misérables.
Marius sits alone in a café, remembering his friends,
who died in battle earlier in the musical.
He sings
“Oh, my friends, my friends, forgive me / That I live and you are gone.”
By addressing characters who aren’t there,
he’s able to show his true feelings without reservation.
Apostrophe to a thing
Apostrophes to inanimate objects
can create strong imagery.
Songwriters tend to do this a lot.
The song “Blue Moon,” written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart,
starts with an apostrophe to the moon:
“Blue moon / You saw me standing alone / Without a dream in my heart.”
By speaking to the moon, the singer paints a vivid picture for listeners.
Apostrophe to an idea
Apostrophescan also address an abstract idea, like love.
In Shakespeare’s King Lear,
there’s one addressed to the concept of ingratitude:
“Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend,
/ More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child / Than the sea-monster.”
Apostrophes in everyday speech
Apostrophesshow up in everyday speech all the time.
People use them to address objects or missing people.
For example, someone waiting at a red light might say,
“Come on, light, turn green!”
Were you looking for information about the punctuation mark?
Well, look no further because we, of course,
have another article devoted to that little apostrophe too.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
'Apostrophe'
A thousand newspapers, blogs, and twitter feeds
found themselves unable to resist temptation,
and posted typo-laden accounts of the demise
of the Apostrophe Protection Society (APS).
The pedants’ pedant:
why the Apostrophe Protection Society has closed in disgust
After 18 years of policing grammatical abuse from around the world,
the APS has conceded defeat. The punctuation barbarians have won
- (headline) The Guardian (London, Eng.), 2 Dec. 2019
The APS was formed in 2001,
ostensibly as a means of helping writers the world over
in putting their apostrophes in the correct places.
Here is our periodic reminder:
there has never been a point in the history of the English-speaking
and English-writing people where we all agreed
on how apostrophes should be used, and there never will be.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Word History
The Other Kindof 'Apostrophe'
It's when we speak to you and it's like you're not here.
What to Know
As a literary device,
apostrophe refers to a speech or address to a person who is not present
orto a personified object, such as Yorick's skull in Hamlet.
It comes from the Greek word apostrephein which means "to turn away."
You are already familiar with the punctuation mark known as the apostrophe.
It’s used chiefly in tandem with an s to indicate possession
(as in Joe’s car)
or in contractionsto stand in for letters that are elided
(as in couldn’t or you’ll).
Apostrophe's Other Use
If you study drama or rhetoric,
you will be familiar with an entirely different idea of apostrophe
—that is, the making of a speech or address to an absent person
ora thing that is personified (such as Death).
As Love’s play begins, she stands tense and exhausted on her front porch, surrounded by red, rolling sky, pulling on a cigarette and staring into the void. She speaks aloud a letter she’s writing to someone called Ruby, then falters, turns the paper over, and begins to write to God instead. (Love’s play features an epigraph from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and the novel’s influence is present throughout, especially in Olivia’s apostrophes to God.)
— Sara Holdren, Vulture, 15 Oct. 2018
A commonly cited instance of apostrophe occurs in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when Hamlet comes across the skull of the jester Yorick, which has been exhumed. “Alas, poor Yorick!” he says, calling his old friend “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.” He then turns back to address Yorick by way of the skull:
Ham. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Apostrophecan consist of one speaking to an inanimate object
—such as how Tom Hanks's character addresses the volleyball named Wilson in the film Cast Away (2000).
It can occur as a figure of speech,
as in the old advertising slogan "Calgon, take me away!"
Origin of 'Apostrophe'
The words for both the punctuation mark
and the dramatic device come from a Greek verb, apostrephein,
meaning “to turn away.”
But they took slightly different paths en route to English,
with the dramatic device passing through Latin
and the punctuation through Late Latin and French.
The adjective apostrophic pertains to the dramatic device:
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Chicken" was, apparently, written with a total lack of irony. It includes a stanza full of apostrophic plea to meat substitutes: "Oh soy 'chicken,' where are your bones? / Where shall I get broth, rich in minerals? / Oh soy 'chicken,' where is your fat? / Without Jewish penicillin, how to cure my husband's cold?"
— Kathleen Alcott, The New Yorker, 22 June 2015
The verb strephein, meaning “to turn” in Greek,
is found in other words pertaining to the art of rhetoric.
One is anastrophe (the inversion of the usual syntactical order
of words for rhetorical effect), often referred to as Yoda-speak,
for the sagacious Star Wars character known for speaking
in object-subject-verb syntax.
An example comes from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1848): "Talent, Mr. Micawber has; capital, Mr. Micawber has not."
Epistrophe is the repetition of a word or expression
at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses
(such as Abraham Lincoln's "of the people, by the people, for the people").
And we would be remiss if we didn’t bring up catastrophe,
which to most people means an utter failure or disaster,
but in theater refers to the final action that completes
the unraveling of a dramatic plot.
And while we’d hate to end our article on apostrophe
on such a catastrophic turn, them’s the breaks.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Word History
Why Do We Use Apostrophes to Show Possession?
The role of the apostrophe has shifted over time
Some like to think of the English language as an orderly sort of thing,
a rock of stability in the chaos and uncertainty of life.
Yet this is far from true: our language is a sloppy mess.
Consider the apostrophe.
There has never been an innocent time in which
we all agreed on what the apostrophe was supposed to do.
Not only does such consensus not exist in the past,
it doesn’t exist now:
the role of this troubling little punctuation mark is still in flux.
The 's' at the end of a word indicating possession
("The king's fashion sense") probably comes from
the Old English custom of adding '-es'
to singular genitive masculine nouns
(in modern English, "The kinges fashion sense").
In this theory, the apostrophe stands in for the missing 'e'.
The markwe call an apostrophe probably originated in 1509,
in an Italian edition of Petrarch, or in 1529,
at the hand of the French printer Geoffroy Tory,
who is also credited with inventing the accent and the cedilla.
Before apostrophe referred to a squiggle on the page,
it was a rhetorical term for an address to a usually absent person
ora usually personified thing
(the word comes from the Greek apostrophē,
which literally means “the act of turning away”).
The first grammatical apostrophes addressed absence in a different way.
It is widely accepted that the first apostrophes were marks of elision
which indicated that something had been taken out of the word.
Here's where things begin to get confusing:
the apostrophe would be stuck into a word
to indicate the removal of a letter (usually a vowel)
which was not pronounced, such asthe e in “walk’d.”
But sometimes people would simply stick
an apostrophe in the middle of a word for no discernible reason,
as the 17th century poet Robert Herrick did
when he wrote “What fate decreed, time now ha’s made us see.”
To make things even more confusing,
people refused to agree on exactly
which letters should be replaced with an apostrophe;
often it was unvoiced single vowels,
but occasionally it was larger pieces of a word,
such as the re and as of fo’c’sle.
Then people began using apostrophes to indicate
the genitive (or possessive) role of a noun,
confusing the public even further.
The role of the apostrophe in a phrase like “the apostrophe’s role”
was hotly debated for decades.
Some people thought that the s at the end of a word
indicating possession was simply a stand-in for “his,”
and so “the king’s book” would be the shortened version of
“the king his book.”
This theory is no longer popular.
Instead, it seems likely that the genitive apostrophe
is an illustration of our language’s older, highly inflectional state.
It's like this:
in Old English it was common
to add an -es to singular genitive masculine and neuter nouns.
For instance,
the genitive form of the word for king, cyning, would be cyninges.
In Middle English, feminine nouns tended to be similarly inflected.
So, the apostrophe is still functioning, in a way, as a mark of elision,
insofar as it is standing in for the missing e of a long-disused genitive case.
That’s all well and good, but why are things still in such a jumble?
Why haven’t we managed to iron out all the kinks
and finally figure out what we’re supposed to do with the apostrophe?
The simple answer, once again,
is that there has never been any widespread agreement
in terms of how we should use the apostrophe.
The Oxford Companion to the English Language
notes that when Shakespeare’s First Folio was published, in 1623,
a mere 4% of the words in it for which we would today
use an apostrophe to indicate possession had such punctuation.
Shakespeare was hardly alone in using his apostrophes willy-nilly;
in a single article from Poor Richard’s Almanac,
Benjamin Franklin both uses and omits the apostrophe for the genitive form of it:
If thou injurest Conscience, it will have its Revenge on thee.
And having calculated the Distance and allow’d Time for it’s Falling,
finds that next Spring we shall have a fine April shower.
One does not have to look very hard to find
examples of apostrophes being manhandled
and put into places where we today would consider them inappropriate.
This does not mean that the people who used them thusly
were uneducated (see: Jane Austen and Thomas Jefferson),
but instead shows us that there wasn’t any widespread agreement on the matter.
Here are some now-discarded things
that grammarians have said about
how to use the apostrophe over the centuries:
The third person singular of certain Verbs, with the Nominative it set before it, is used Impersonally: as, It rain's, it snow's, it lighten's, it thunder's….
—Jeremiah Wharton, The English-Grammar, 1654
It shouldn’t be used as it’s for “it is” at all: It’s for it is is vulgar; ‘tis is used.
—James Buchanan, A Regular English Syntax, 1767
Today, most of us feel comfortable in the knowledge that
we don’t use apostrophes for verbs, and few of us still say or write 'tis.
Yet while these are extreme examples from long ago,
there are numerous ways in which the apostrophe’s use
has changed within the past few decades.
A number of institutions, such as Harrods department store
and Barclays bank,
have decided that the apostrophes that long
were part of their names are no longer necessary.
And it was formerly more common to write 1930’s, rather than 1930s,
but a look at each of these forms in several newspaper databases
shows that this practice is changing.
During the 1930’s, the West nurtured a very strong interest in things Chinese, including art.
—David L. Shirley, The New York Times, 17 Apr., 1971
The works were reportedly confiscated by the Nazis during the 1930s and ’40s….
—Adam W. Kepler, The New York Times, 3 Nov., 2013
For those who are wholly uninterested in the history of the apostrophe
and simply want to know the difference between it’s and its,
we have a video that should clear that up.
And for those who fear that
they will never wrap their heads around all the whys and wherefores
(which a small minority has always insisted on
writing as “why’s and wherefore’s) of the apostrophe,
here's a cheering thought:
no matter how badly you misuse this punctuation,
there is a good chance that some famous writer in the past
has done the same thing.
Furthermore, there is a sporting chance that
any mistakes you make with it will one day come back into fashion.
Common Errors In English Usage Dictionary
Acronyms& apostrophes
One unusual modern useof the apostrophe is in plural acronyms,
like“ICBM’s” “NGO’s” and “CD’s”.
Since this pattern violates the rule
that apostrophes are not used before an S indicating a plural,
many people object to it.
It is also perfectly legitimate to write “CDs,” etc. See also “50’s.”
But the use of apostropheswith initialisms
like“learn your ABC’s and “mind your P’s and Q’s”
is now so universal as to be acceptable in almost any context.
Note that
“acronym” was used originally
only to label pronounceable abbreviations like “NATO,”
but is now generally appliedto all sorts of initialisms.
Be aware thatsome people consider this extended definition
of “acronym” to be an error.
