{"id":417,"date":"2006-07-04T15:19:04","date_gmt":"2006-07-04T23:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/?p=417"},"modified":"2006-07-04T15:19:04","modified_gmt":"2006-07-04T23:19:04","slug":"you-learn-something-new-every-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/2006\/07\/04\/you-learn-something-new-every-day\/","title":{"rendered":"You Learn Something New Every Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It dawned on me this weekend that I don&#8217;t actually know what <a href=\"http:\/\/espn.com\/\">ESPN<\/a> stands for.  I could guess Sports and Network, but didn&#8217;t know the other letters.  According to Wikipedia, it originally stood for the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/ESPN\">Entertainment and Sports Programming Network<\/a>.  Oddly, Wikipedia didn&#8217;t refer to this as an acronym, they referred to it as an <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Initialism\">initialism<\/a>.  That led me to reading about a number of distinctions I was never aware of in the English language:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Acronym &#8211; (ex. SCUBA) &#8211; A word that is pronounceable on it&#8217;s own, but is derived from the first letters of other words.<\/li>\n<li>Initialism &#8211; (ex. ESPN) &#8211; A word that&#8217;s made up of the first letters of other words, but isn&#8217;t pronounced as a word, it&#8217;s read like initials.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Backronym\">Bacronym<\/a> &#8211; (ex. Perl) &#8211; A word that didn&#8217;t originate as an acronym, but later on people decided to assign words to each of the letters.  Perl is a programming language that was originally spelled &#8220;Pearl&#8221; but was later shortened to Perl and assigned the acronym &#8220;Practical Extraction and Report Language&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Apronym\">Apronym<\/a> &#8211; (ex. SAD) &#8211; This is a special case of an acronym or bacronym, where the word also describes, or is related to, the words that compose it.  SAD stands for &#8220;Seasonal Affective Disorder&#8221; which commonly results in depression and sadness.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It dawned on me this weekend that I don&#8217;t actually know what ESPN stands for. I could guess Sports and Network, but didn&#8217;t know the other letters. According to Wikipedia, it originally stood for the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Oddly, Wikipedia didn&#8217;t refer to this as an acronym, they referred to it as an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5TCqO-6J","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}