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01 June 2010

One-way abbreviations: What are some one-way abbreviations, i.e. abbreviations that work one way and not another?[More:]

Case in point, some people abbreviate "http://" as "hitty-ping" which is totally faster to say but not to write. Or in the same vein (since who REALLY says "hitty-ping"?): "dub-dub-dub" instead of "www".

Okay, so it's a bit random, but can you think of any others? Are there any non-internet examples?
I never heard hitty-ping before! That's awesome.
posted by Miko 01 June | 13:44
some people abbreviate "http://" as "hitty-ping"[citation needed]

It's an interesting idle question, though; I'm trying to think of how to nail it down in more specific terms since that'd probably make it easier to identify good examples. With both "http://" and "www" what we're dealing with is:

1. A non-acronymic string of characters (as opposed to e.g. RADAR where we just say "ray-dar"), such that
2. Pronouncing the string literally is time consuming and so
3. A non-literal spoken rendering is used to reduce the audio footprint in conversation, but
4. A phonetic transliteration of that audio rendering yields a longer literal written string than the original string from (1).

None of that is particularly weird, and I think the main thing is that the focus needs to be on finding things like (1), non-acronymic strings, that get rendered in their shortcut form in something other than a literal recital of the component characters (since if the nickname is just the literal string spoken, (4) doesn't apply as returning it to written form would likely just mean returning to the original form in (1) without any change.
posted by cortex 01 June | 13:54
To that end, I would speculate that the best bet for non-internet or pre-internet examples would be engineering jargon.
posted by cortex 01 June | 13:56
No a terribly strong example but (spoken) "CAT Scan" vs the (conventionally written) CT Scan?
posted by ufez 01 June | 14:42
A lot of those in computing... for example, Scuzzy (SCSI), Sequel (SQL)
posted by qvantamon 01 June | 15:31
I went years referring to SQL as "Squeel" before being corrected by the only IT person who wasn't laughing behind my back.

And I prefer "hittip" as verbal shorthand for http.
posted by oneswellfoop 01 June | 16:06
"Sequel" for SQL used to give me the heebie-jeebies, but now, having not beaten them, etc.
posted by pompomtom 01 June | 20:57
I spell is out - "S Q L". I guess that makes me a freak.

posted by dg 01 June | 22:16
No, I totally prefer to spell it out, dg.
posted by Eideteker 01 June | 22:47
We have a winner! || It was a long time ago.

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