initialisms

Need a Replacement PDQ?

sesquiotic9 Comments

If I say “We need a replacement PDQ,” do you know WTF that means? You might, or you might guess, but let’s face it: PDQ is Prime Dad Quality stuff. It was major popular in the middle 20th century, but now it’s mainly an old-style joke, retro like a Kodak Instamatic. You’re more likely to encounter it now in the name of the satirical composer PDQ Bach (invented by Peter Schickele in 1965, and last seen in concert in 2015) than in earnest.

So… yeah, if you don’t know what PDQ stands for, your odds of guessing it are only middling. If I said it meant PFQ, would that help? How about if I replaced it with RFN? Would you get that I meant we need a replacement immediately?

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Frankly Useless Crank “Knowledge,” Only For Fools

sesquiotic16 Comments

Have you heard where fuck comes from? For Use of Carnal Knowledge. No, um, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. No, wait, Fornication Under Consent of King. No, it’s…

…It’s Frankly Usage Crank “Knowledge,” Only For Fools. Or FUCK OFF for short.

Sorry to shit on your party trick – don’t worry, it won’t Ship High In Transit, because FUCK OFF – but no swearwords ever in English (or probably any other language) have been created from acronyms. This is for two reasons:

  1. Acronyms are intrinsically euphemistic. They are used to camouflage rude, offensive, or otherwise unendurable things (often just unendurably long).
  2. Acronyms have only really been used to generate words since the mid-20th century.

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