Very deep multiply nested acronyms
SECS: no, this is not just a misspelling designed to get your attention, but one of a flock of responses to our request for nested acronyms or initialisms (5 June).
Dawn Bradford reports that it stands for SEMI (Semiconductor equipment manufacturing industries) equipment communication standard. Some machines she worked on conformed to one or other of the two “levels” set out in the standard. Others did not need to communicate, so neither level applied. This led to the list on her wall headed “SECS I”, “SECS II” – and “British”, in homage to the theatrical comedy No Sex Please, We’re…
Advertisement
As Keith Sewell reminds us, the military “love to partake in the [nested acronyms] fetish”. He provides a rich seam of multiple nesting. Consider MAGERD, the MRCA AGE requirement document, in which MRCA stands for the multi-role combat aircraft and AGE for aircraft ground equipment. Blame for coining this probably belongs to a functionary of NAMMA, the NATO MRCA management agency, NATO being that well-known treaty organisation spanning the north Atlantic.
Given computer programmers’ enthusiasm for acronym-mangling as an end in itself, we asked for examples “outside the world of geekery”. Alistair Lockyer nominates “TIARA is a recursive acronym”, a phrase that appears on Wikipedia’s as a “non-technical example”. TIARA is in fact so recursive it points to nothing in the world except itself.
Edward Sayers is too modest, therefore, in introducing his submission thus: “While still inside the field of geek, cell biology always throws up impressive nested acronyms.” For he brings us SNAREs, which as he says are “SNAp REceptors, SNAPs being soluble NSF attached proteins, and NSF being N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive fusion protein”. Not only is this multiply nested but one nest is inside another.
Just as we were revising our acronym classification scheme to include such second-order nesting, more flew in. Peter Wakelin produced a third-order, or arguably fourth-order, nesting. Perhaps predicting scepticism, he refers us to of the Report of the 37th Meeting of The Co-ordination Group for Meteorological Satellites, held on Jeju Island, South Korea, in October 2009.
There we find that RARS is the regional ATOVS etransmission service; ATOVS is advanced TOVS; TOVS is TIROS operational vertical sounder and TIROS is television infrared observation satellite. So, in our now-overwhelmed parenthetical notation, that would be: regional (advanced ((television infrared observation satellite) operational vertical sounder)) retransmission service. We hope we counted the parentheses correctly there.
“According to Wikipedia, “is controlled by a multitouch display sensitive to fingertip contact with up to eleven fingers”. Ian Napier wonders how he can put this to the test”
THE discovery of this very deep multiple nesting (VDMN) should have wrapped up this topic – but then we read Alan Olson’s message assuring us that LPGA is yet another case of nesting, since members of the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association play a game originally spelt out as “gentlemen only, ladies forbidden”. We have now checked utterly infallible internet sources and can report that this is either an urban legend or, since there are so few references, more probably a spoof with a single author.
Having a loathing of golf, we are rather sorry to find it isn’t true – and, what’s more, we are disappointed to discover that, despite the existence of websites offering to treat such debilitating conditions as a fear of puppets (12 January 2008) there is no official sciencey word for the possibly career-limiting condition of golf-phobia.
AND that, surely, is that, we thought – but no, for here is Jon Prinz telling us that some years ago he presented a paper at the 1995 Annual Scientific Meeting of the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Hong Kong, which had the title “Average chewing rates on nut yoghurt mixtures”.
“As you will see immediately,” he says, “the acronym of this paper title is ACRONYM.”
He challenges Feedback readers to produce a similar title, one which is an acronym for “acronym”, and then – this is the hard part – get it published in a reputable journal. Unless and until this happens, that’s enough on acronyms.
TURNING finally to other matters, the magazine of UK supermarket Waitrose waxed lyrical in its June issue about wood-burning ovens, which “can be used to create everything from pizza and roast pork to bread and fish”.
Nick Ingrams, however, is underwhelmed. “Stopping merely at creating fish isn’t really pushing the boundaries all that much,” he suggests. He indicates that he would take more notice if the ovens could create “a herd of bison, perhaps”.