Acronyms and the Art of acrobatic titles

 Do Titles contract into Acronyms or Acronyms expand to Titles

In a world driven by twiitterati lingo and WhatsApp or Telegram rat –a- tats, there is still an orthodox school of shortening lengthy expressions or titles .

Acronyms.

I have not done any search in the obligatory Google or even pulled out my family's three generations old  Websters.

Nor can I recollect any session when my English teachers from Secondary school onwards , devoting attention or drawing our attention on Acronyms as a linguistic attribute.

But, I have come to realise that your life will be as barren as a totally locked down Central station ,without these inescapable features of English language , in particular.

Doing my own DIY in semantics, I presume that Acronyms are contraptions discovered to help :

1. Ensure that the long title of practically anything, from the name of an Institution to a Weapons Programme ,to a Peace Treaty among nations , to a Scheme promoted by a Public body like Government – is  contracted with a phrase in Capital letters- so that it is easy to communicate that Proper Name in context, wherever it is necessary.( in the legal bombastic, : ”hereinafter called as...”)

2. It conveys the essence or crux of the long title , without embarking on a mini explanatory lecture every time it is to be used

3. It is an authorised authenticated Mnemonic- a quick recall tool for cognising what it represents.

Let me explain each of above:

a)IIT stand for Indian Institute of Technology;

PMO for Prime Minister’s Office;

NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

ICBM expands as Inter Continental Ballistic Missile

IBM stands for International Business Machines

BBC stands for British Broadcasting Corporation

RTO Road Transport Office

And so on.

b)          IPC-Indian Penal Code

        COVID 19 Corona Virus Disease 2019 strain

        RT PCR -Rapid Test Polymerase Chain Reaction

        NEET for  National Eligibilty cum Entrance Test

The above two classes are relatively straight forward. There is a lengthy title or phrase –from which you pick up the First letter of each word and put them together in the same order –you get a nice abbreviation or acronym. And more often than not, by recalling or associating each of those capital letters, you may be able to even second guess the title they represent itself.

IIT for example, have been household names in many families of aspiring Indian parents ( of course a nightmare for the bounded students).

AIIMS ,certainly in these Corona Times ,would be as much self explanatory.

In a way, these abbreviations , metamorphose into Brands.

BBC is a classic case,in hand. So is IBM.( you may call in Lenova ,when it comes to laptops but an old computer savvy gent would still remember it as IBM only- like we refuse to reconcile to Mount Road being called Anna Salai ,even after 50 years of rechristening!)

And some Acronyms have lived evergreen even after transformation of the organisations  they were originally attached to.

E.g, ICICI ,originally Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India, is now ICICI Bank ,even post its entire corporate expanded to become a Universal Bank., retaining the embedded value of the original enterprise in its new avatar.

But the third class is the most complicated.

And that is what I am baffled by. In this category, the most complicated challenge in the taxonomy is to make the abbreviation facile enough to pronounce, spell per the grammatical constraints of the language, and enable ,most importantly ,the recall and association aspects in its frequent usage.

In the process, some titles lend to be easy  in phonetics but some can be a nightmare.

For illustration, take MGNREGA- Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act(!!!). If you are a beneficiary, you simply need not bother to learn of the expansion

(Nor if you are a labour contractor , who prepares such a muster ,that it passes the muster of the sanctioning official, duly lubricated for passage)

Unless if you happen to be  a Civil Services aspirant,  who perforce learns it by rote for the General Studies paper, how many will be able to expand it without searching in the salvation army of Google?    And added agony is if you happen to be a junior politician asked to inaugurate an MGNREGA project to dredge a derelict pond, and you have all the vernacular TV channels, who have been invited to cover your speech (at a cost of course, which will be debited to the Project Account as “Standing Charges”, literally for the act), unless you carry a a small slip to fit the size of your palm, can you say M.G..N.R.E.G..A in order, ..without removing your Corona Mask for a glass of sanitised water?

Perhaps, if your P.A had briefed you professionally, you can get away by saying “Gandhi Scheme”

This is exactly, where the egg comes out of the chicken, for a change!

Or if you are old fashioned “ fellow” ,it is a legitimate ‘putting the cart before the horse.’

Now the High Priests who either baptise and name as in West  or those who do Jatha karma ,as in our Bharath Mahaan, have invented a brilliant way around this rigmarole .

Rather than the title giving birth to the acronym, the acronym  renames it parent!

The idea is simply make the former adapt to ensure latter’s passability in phonetics, ease of recall and many times make it romantic.

I myself ,pleasantly ,discovered this art by sheer serendipity. When we wanted to launch a grand registry of hospitals, which were included in same, the approved list of Insurance Companies, so that a very comprehensive data base of all insurance reimbursed transactions can be captured, we decided to enumerate all such hospitals in the country by allocating them a Unique Identity (a la Aadhar for individuals)

The enumeration was comparatively easier using certain internationally accepted standards but what do we call this lsiting as ?

It is Registry; it is for Hospitals;it is only for those who provide insurance paid care;

All fine . Can we name it HIR? Or RIH ?  After several days and times of iterations, we had our Aha moment!

We chose to call it “ Registry of Hospitals in the Insurer Approved Network”

The resulting acronym would have been RHIAN. OK but not romantic .

So , we rejigged the whole thing: Registry Of Hospitals In Network of Insurers.

Bingo ! It is ROHINI ! A perfect name of a Star, a place and may be given name of the famous actress Ms.Hattangadi! We felt excited like Da Cunha of Amul advertisements after a cheeky Amul Girl ad.

Now , you will understand why they have named it as AYUSH and not SHUAY! Very aesthetically arranged sequence of Ayurvedha, Yoga, Unani, Sidhdha, Homeoapthy and the resultant acronym integrated ,means Healthy Life.! 

If you thought this is brilliant, the award really goes to RECOVERY- the cooperative Covid vaccine trial ongoing in UK which steals the thunder: It is the acronym of Randomised Evaluation of COVid -19 thERapY !

Vaccine or no, they have broken the established algorithm of sequencing First Alphabets of each word in the Title to form its acronym. See the way , they picked and chose letters to mark the mission !

I wish the Indian bureaucracy picks a leaf from these Oxford researchers and does something about PMJKAY- Prime Minsiter’s Jan Kalyan Anna Yojana.

 Lest it will not be ‘Mann ki Baath”. Will become “None ki Baath”!