The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I decided to get technical. FYI, FYI is not an acronym; it's an abbreviation. SNAFU is an example of an acronym. OMG is an abbreviation, but NATO and ASCII are both acronyms. But you knew this already.

"FYI, FYI is not an acronym; it's an abbreviation. SNAFU is an example of an acronym."

FYI is unique in that it qualifies as an acronym and an abbreviation. Most acronyms form a new word made up of the first letters of a group of words like OPEC and FYI doesn't form a word... but still qualifies as an acronym, since there are various meanings. Not that it really matters...

OK, I'll bite. As an abbreviation, FYI is not unique in having multiple definitions. That's not what defines an acronym. Department of Energy, Department of Education--both are D-O-E and neither is an acronym. As someone who has worked for one of those organizations for almost 20 years, no one calls the Department of Energy a female deer (unless he or she is new). The search engine on acronymfinder.com also searches for abbreviations. However the list it returns calls everything an acronym. So I wouldn't use the column header as a means to define what's in the column. Why did I check all this? I wanted to know if I was wrong.

Anyway, all in good fun. This is why I like the Forum: friendly people who occasionally digress off topic. It would be less fun if we didn't.

Well, whatever it is - acronym or abbreviation, I never even considered that when I posted the title... it just came to mind.

The only person in my past that would have cared was my high school English teacher... she was an absolute stickler for correct usage of the English language. Unfortunately, she would be fired now, since no one of the newer generation could have passed her class.

My favorite is RTFM..........Refer to the Friggin Manual.

BOHICA- Bend over, here it comes again.

I like those. Pretty good.

Anyway, having nothing better to do a few days ago I decided to see if Wikipedia had an entry on SNAFU. Sure enough, it did. With pretty good certainty the term originated during WWII in the US armed forces. The Dept of Defense put out a call for some instructional cartoons. Warner Brothers underbid Disney and got the contract. So Chuck Jones, Mel Blanc, and some others created Pvt Snafu cartoons as part of the war effort. You can guess that the private illustrates what not to do. The term was already well established by then.The thing that I found the most interesting was that one of the script writers was none other than Dr. Seuss!

The cartoons are on Youtube.