Is it an Acronym or Something Else?

When I was in high school, we studied the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ambitious series of programs, projects, financial reforms and regulations enacted in the 1930s to combat the Great Depression. What I remember was seeing a wall full of letters that indicated the program names: CCC, CWA, WPA, TVA, NRA, PWA, AAA, FSA, FHA. It was a veritable alphabet soup.

Online and in print, we still live in that virtual alphabet soup: LOL, IMHO, BRB, TTFN, B2B, B2C. In sports, there’s MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL, MLS (plus WWE, WCW and AEW if you’re into sports entertainment). In business, B2B, B2C, NYSE and AMEX. Oil has OPEC. World politics has NATO. Heck, we even call our country USA.

And so on.

I’ve seen many of these called acronyms. But other than AMEX, OPEC and NATO, none of these are acronyms. To be an acronym, the letters must form a word, or at least something we can pronounce as if it were a word.

Everything else is what’s called an initialism, which is when you say the individual letters.

RAM is an acronym; DVD is an intialism.

NASA is an acronym; FBI and CIA are initialisms.

Then there are acronyms that have become so common, they lose their capitalization. Laser originally was "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." Scuba was "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus."

I thought a Scud missile was some sort of acronym. It’s not. It’s a tactical ballistic missile developed in the Soviet Union and exported to Second and Third World countries, most famously in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The S refers to it being a surface-to-surface missile.

Is that FUBAR enough for you?