ACRONYMS

An acronym is a word that’s formed from the first letter or letters of the parts of a compound term, and can be used to abbreviate a phrase. We use acronyms every day, many times without knowing what they mean. This week, Tidbits unravels the meanings of some common acronyms, and some of them might surprise you!

• Back in 1937, Hormel Foods introduced an inexpensive meat product and held a contest to name it. The winning entry was SPAM for this canned luncheon meat, believed to either stand for “Shoulder of Pork And Ham,” or simply “Spiced Ham.” Since then, more than 8 billion cans of SPAM have been sold, and today it’s available in 15 different varieties, including teriyaki, jalapeno, and Portuguese sausage. The word “spam” also refers to those annoying, unsolicited e-mails that clutter your inbox! The New Oxford Dictionary of English already had the lunchmeat SPAM listed, but added an entry for those pesky internet messages in 1998.

• FIAT, Italy’s largest automobile manufacturer, opened its first factory in 1900, where 35 employees assembled 24 cars that year. By 1903, the company had generated a profit and had upped their production to 135 vehicles. FIAT takes its name from “Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino,” which translates “Italian automobile factory of Turin.”

• BMW takes its name from the German words “Bayerische Motoren Werke,” or “Bavarian Motor Works,” a company that initially manufactured aircraft engines beginning in 1913. BMW produced its first motorcycle in 1913, but didn’t become an automobile manufacturer until 1928.

• “P.S., I love you,” “P.S., don’t forget your umbrella,” “P.S., say Hi to your mom.” All of these are phrases written at the end of a letter or e-mail. So what does P.S. actually stand for? It’s short for “postscript,” from the Latin word “postscriptum,” which translates “written after.”

• Also derived from the Latin are the common acronyms A.M. and P.M., referring to morning and afternoon. A.M. is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase “ante meridiem,” meaning “before midday,” while P.M. is short for “post meridiem,” translating “after midday.”

• What about the request you receive to RSVP to an invitation? That phrase comes from the French language, and is short for “repondez s’il vous plait,” which translates “please respond.”

• There are more than 400 IKEA stores operating in upwards of 50 countries worldwide. The company was founded in 1943 by a 17-year-old Swedish boy named Ingvar Kamprad, with money received from his father as a reward for succeeding in his schoolwork. Kamprad started a mail-order business selling pens, wallets, picture frames, watches, and nylon stockings. He named his business based on his initials I.K., followed by the first letters of his family farm Elmtaryd and his hometown of Agunnaryd. Kamprad opened his first furniture store in Sweden in 1953, followed by the first IKEA store in 1958. After spreading across Scandinavia, the company expanded to Switzerland in 1973, Germany in 1974, Australia in 1975, and Canada in 1976. The first U.S. store opened in Philadelphia in 1985. IKEA has been the world’s largest furniture retailer since 2008.

• If you say you’re stopping by the ATM machine, you’re repeating yourself. Since ATM stands for “automated teller machine,” you’re redundantly saying “automated teller machine machine.”

• Some people confuse the FAA with the FFA, but the two couldn’t be more different. The Federal Aviation Administration is a government agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation. It oversees all aspects of aviation, including operation of airports, management of air traffic, and certification of aircraft over the United States and its surrounding international waters. The agency was created in 1958, replacing the former Civil Aeronautics Administration.

• The FFA, or Future Farmers of America became a nationwide organization in 1928 in Kansas City, Missouri, as a resource for students interested in agriculture and leadership. The group has grown to more than 700,000 members in 8,612 chapters, covering all 50 states.

• In 1957, the first patent was issued for a non-stick cooking spray. In 1959, Arthur Meyerhoff and Leon Rubin founded PAM products, giving the cooking spray the name PAM standing for Product of Arthur Meyerhoff. The spray’s main ingredient is canola oil. Incidentally, did you know there is no such thing as a canola plant? Canola oil comes from rapeseed, a bright yellow flowering member of the mustard family. The word canola stands for Canada Oil Low Acid, since Canada is the world’s top producer of rapeseed.

• Do you know the meaning of all of your computer formats? JPEG, the method that compresses images, stands for “Joint Photographic Experts Group,” while the moving images known as GIFs are technically known as “Graphics Interchange Format.” The digital file format known as PDF, created in the early 1990s by Adobe, stands for “Portable Document Format.” Sometimes a website asks you to verify you aren’t a robot by sending you a CAPTCHA, a test that requires users to solve a simple puzzle of letters and numbers in a distorted pattern in order to be allowed access to the site. Computer techs from Carnegie Mellon and IBM coined the phrase in 2003, forming an acronym from “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.”

• What about all of the acronyms that have been created since the advent of the internet, chat rooms, and texting? We now type BRB for “Be Right Back,” IMO for “In My Opinion,” and TTYL for “Talk to You Later.” AFK symbolizes “Away From Keyboard,” while BTW means “By The Way.” In the world of computer dating, SWF is the acronym for “Single White Female,” SWM is its male counterpart, and SO means “Significant Other.” If a user records VBD, it was a Very Bad Date!

• Although lots of folks think that “Arby’s” is an acronym for the roast beef (“R.B.”) sandwiches the restaurant chain is famous for, the name is actually an abbreviation for its founders, Leroy and Forrest Raffel, the Raffel Brothers. The brothers, who were owners of a restaurant equipment business, founded the franchise in 1964 in Boardman, Ohio.

• DARE, the program designed to “keep kids off drugs,” was established in 1983 as a partnership between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Unified School District as an education program for elementary school students. The acronym stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education. □