Spelling it out
IAN FRENNEY appealed to readers for examples of “retronyms” – words made by sounding out the individual letters of an acronym (22 April). He offered emcee, okay and kayo, to which we added Jeep, from the US army’s General Purpose vehicle.
“There are many more examples of retronyms in common use, quite a number relating to military vehicles or aircraft,” writes Cedric Lynch.
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“The successor to the Jeep, the High Mobility Military Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), is usually called the Humvee.” He also cites the Iroquois Utility Helicopter, whose original designation HU-1 lent it the nickname Huey.
Dictionary definitions
PUTTING a tiger in our retronym tank, Jake Burger suggests the petroleum brand Esso, “which takes its name from the phoneticised initials for Standard Oil, as the company was known prior to 1911”.
And a few minutes with Chambers has Douglas Woodall delivering a patter of retronyms, including deejay, veejay, jaycee (a member of the junior chamber of commerce), tee-tee (a teototaller), and “veep, for vice-president”.
“”I’ve just started using a bottle of what Tesco describes as ‘Ocean Bleach’,” says Tony Compton. “I hope it doesn’t affect corals.””
Sound bites
AND how could we forget fraternal falsetto pop trio the Bee Gees? They took their stage name from the shorthand for Brothers Gibb, Bryn Glover – a B. G. himself – reminds us. And that a BBC channel devoted to children’s programming goes by the somewhat fractured retronym CBeebies.
Bryn also offers a rare single letter retronym – pee – which he suggests might be derived from the truncation of a less-savoury word for the act.
Double Deutsch
DELVING into foreign tongues for retronyms, Stuart Arnold remarks “I thought German would have a lot of them, as Germans love making words from contractions of others.” The most obvious one, he says, is the supermarket chain Edeka “which is the German pronunciation of EDK, for the company Einkaufsgenossenschaft der Kolonialwarenhändler“. Another “is Kadewe, KDW, the Kaufhaus des Westens.” All in all, a great start. Are there any more?
Pet theory
AUSTRALIAN chiropractor Bernard Nadolny is in the doghouse after being prosecuted for treating animals for reward without a veterinary licence. The bone-knocker saw cats and dogs at his practice, diagnosing diseases such as cancer and arthritis.
“I’ve treated racehorses, ponies, foals, llamas, alpacas, birds, chooks,” Nadolny boasted to Australia’s The Sunday Mail in 2006, “Their structure is almost the same as ours.” Take that, medical specialism!
Over at , you can see a collection of chiropractors performing their manipulations on the furry and feathered (pictures garnered from their own websites). This includes a photo of one attempting to adjust the spine of a turtle. Baffling, perhaps. Just don’t call it turtle-y bogus.
A bright idea
AMID all the bad news, something shines. The Guardian reports that scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel have developed pellets loaded with genetically engineered bacteria that glow in the presence of explosives. .
Feedback is also excited by the possibility that the technology might one day be used in other areas where you might need to watch your step: could we see paving slabs that light up in the presence of dog mess? Until that comes to pass, we must renew our campaign to have glow-in-the-dark glitter added to pet food as standard.
Stone the crows
JON LULY sends news of a kind of fruitloopery that he worries may be self-correcting. He is talking about the healing stones known as green zebra jasper, dragon scale stone, or chrysotile.
Online retailer Raven Crystals tells us the green and white banded rock is “an excellent stone for supporting honesty and sincerity”, and “the ” .
Indeed, those powdery stripes running through the stone should prompt any good geologist to draw on their ancient knowledge and call this mineral by its other name: white asbestos.
Earlier this year, the Queensland government issued a safety alert over the sale of chrysotile, which had appeared in shops as finished pendants and as ““, and reminded citizens that the import, manufacture, supply and sale of asbestos-containing products was banned in 2003.
We admit the stone does seem to be working its honesty and sincerity powers on the proprietor of Howl at the Moon Gems, who opts not to sell the poisonous product and informs customers “if you want a great stone for working with the Crown or Heart Chakra, it is my personal opinion that you could make much wiser choices than this particular one”.
High precision billing
WATCH the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves, the saying goes. John Culver finds Virgin Mobile doing just that, as he tells us: “My latest phone bill has a card processing fee that has been calculated to 16 decimal places.” Every little helps!