My Favorite Neologism: The Backronym
I hate acronyms. Hate them. They represent the worst of our tribal nature, forming code words that only insiders can understand while excluding us ignorant outsiders. The government, military, social media, and medicine are clogged with acronyms—capital letters that represent words.
Lately, Congress has gotten all creative with acronyms, rearranging the names of legislation to form actual words. Several days ago, the Senate introduced the RESTRICT Act. It stands for “The Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act.”
You can almost hear those words crying out in pain.
Clearly, some staffers had gotten together with way too much coffee and tried to find a word to which they could attach more or less relevant words. And they came up with a term that really doesn’t explain what the act is actually for.
The proposed legislation really has to do with banning Tik Tok, the social app owned by a Chinese company. Could they have considered, say:
TIKTOFF: The Information and Knowledge Technology Objective to Forbid Foreign, um, threats?
Maybe not. In any case, this reverse engineering of acronyms has a name: the backronym. “Backronym” itself is a portmanteau, a word that combines parts of two other words—in this case, “backward” and “acronym.”
Granted, the government has a good reason to think about how its acronyms might be pronounced. When I was a magazine editor and reporter in Washington many years ago, one of the agencies I covered was the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation—nicknamed, to the frustration of its employees, “Bore.” During a reorganization, the agency became the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service. Which immediately became known as “Hookers.”
If you want to make fun of an organization or effort you don’t particularly like—and if you’re as nerdily meanspirited as I am—you can propose new backronyms of your own. My sister in law, a kind, public minded woman, recently began hosting a series of women-only tea parties to discuss ways to foster kinder, gentler public discourse. I proposed a name:
Union of Women Interested in Saving Humanity. Or: U-WISH.
Sorry, Jane.
Now, what if I wanted to form an organization that fights the proliferation of acronyms? What should its backronym be?
Oh, wait. Never mind.
P.S. Patrick Gibbons, who teaches at Notre Dame’s business school, notes that George Mason University got itself in acronymical trouble when it renamed its law school the Antonin Scalia School of Law. A backronym of a different kind.
