Re: [TUHS] etymology of cron

Ronald Natalie scripsit: Indeed, any word older than about 1890 is not an acronym, with a few Hebrew and Arabic exceptions like Tanakh, Rambam, _abjad_. POTUS and SCOTUS were codewords devised in 1879 and meant to be used on the wire only, but occasionally leaked into print. Initialisms like SPQR are much older, with English-language examples like O.K. and N.G. dating to the 1840s. It's not clear when A.W.O.L. switched from an initialism to an acronym proper, probably WWI; the same ambiguity applies to O.U.D.S. The word _acronym_ itself is first recorded in 1940 (borrowed from German), and they certainly had taken off by that time. The oldest ones consistently written as an ordinary word (no capitals, no periods) are probably _radar_ and _snafu_ (both 1941), though some older ones lose their caps at a later date, like the now-obscure MUSA (multiple unit steerable antenna) and W/Op (wireless operator), later _musa_ and _wop_. The later _loran_, _fubar_, _jato_ also fall into this category. "Rip track" (1892) may be the oldest retronym in English; it's a stretch of railroad track used to repair rolling stock, later reinterpreted as "Repair In Place". -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org You escaped them by the will-death and the Way of the Black Wheel. I could not. --Great-Souled Sam