Diasfora
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Discover99 on February 11, 2011, 03:15:39 PM
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hi
I'm wondering about acronyms: why am I not allowed
to play a word like FBI albeit jato is fine. I looked it up
and the definitions I found said it's an acronym too.
does somebody care to explain?
:)
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jato, "jet-assisted take off" shouldn't be allowed as I have found no other definitions for it on m-w.com or dictionary.com. This site agrees with me.
http://www.collinslanguage.com/extras/scrabble.aspx
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It's because JATO has been regularised like SCUBA or RADAR, so it becomes acceptable in scrabble.
Just one of those things Disco.
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It's because JATO has been regularised like SCUBA or RADAR, so it becomes acceptable in scrabble.
Just one of those things Disco.
thanks :)
does regularized mean
a that I pronounce the letters as if they
were a regular word in opposite of FBI or ASAP
b that it's not written in capital letters?
btw I didn't know your examples were acronyms too.
We say radar in German too and I grew up using it and never spent a second thought on it.
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I have to confess, it was Dweez who taught me that "SCUBA" (self contained underwater breathing apparatus) was an acronym, when he mentioned it here. Strange that I had never come across that before as I knew that others, probably because I can't swim :)
Regularised means that they have almost become the word that they are describing - a noun if you like - but they can't really ever stop being acronyms as that is their etymology. Personally I wouldn't consider JATO as a regularised acronym, but I believe within certain professions it would be.
The other thing (which is purely my opinion), is that I think for an acronym to become regularised in a grammatical form, it would have to have a legitimate spelling structure that could be spoken differently to the acronym itself. For instance: RADAR is spoken as a word not a string of letters, whereas, FBI has to be sounded out in 3 separate parts and not "fuhbee", so you can see why it wouldn't really work in scrabble?
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Because it would be totally awesome to put a J on the triple letter tile and getting the double word tile to boot.
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The Oxford dictionary definition for acronism is - an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word (e.g. ASCII, NASA).
which technically would suggest that FBI isn't one anyway, but rather an initialism.
Oxford's definition of initialism - an abbreviation consisting of initial letters pronounced separately (e.g. BBC).
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Yeah, "regularised" acronyms are generally decided on by community, whether world-wide, as in SCUBA and RADAR, or a more distinct community, say the Texting world with things like, lol, omw, swak, etc.
I always thought a good rule of thumb was that if it got a submission in the Merriam-Webster or Oxford Dictionary.
Also, another difference between FBI and JATO is that FBI is an acronym for a proper noun (gov't agency in this case) while jato isn't and proper nouns aren't allowed in Scrabble.
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thanks so much for your answers! this is really interesting to me
also I hadn't heard of initial anacronyms before and tbh I dont really get the concept.
but on some level it makes much more sense now :)
I had to look up swak - sealed with a kiss, used in a text message? that's funny
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buy a scrabble dictionary and have a read of it :o
what weird words are in it .
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I had to look up swak - sealed with a kiss, used in a text message? that's funny
Since a child I have always known that as SWALK (sealed with a loving kiss). especially as it was the name of this great movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067418/) that I grew up with.
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movie looks interesting
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Scrabble is addictiing. I cant stop playing since I downloaded the app for my phone
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Scrabble is addictiing. I cant stop playing since I downloaded the app for my phone
I used to have it on a couple of PPCs and the missus and myself played via bluetooth. The problem was it didn't like British English :(
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Scrabble is addictiing. I cant stop playing since I downloaded the app for my phone
are you playing words with friends?
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are you playing words with friends?
Yeah. It has alot glitches tho and I play wordfued to
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Words with friends: Xhrist.
(as if anyone cares)
??? ???
Yeah. It has alot glitches tho and I play wordfued to
I play wwf too on the iphone it doesn't have glitches. if you like we could
play a game or two? maybe we can add each other that would be fun :)
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Ur lucky because on mytouch 4g it freezes or it wont load the games and ill have to restart it. Anywho that would be nice my username is pinkbows
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It works on my iPhone(4)
/me snickers
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It works on my iPhone(4)
:P . do you see the game that we were playing because its disappeared on my phone.
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it says android version
2.2.1
I dont see the game we were playing and i restarted twice already. maybe if you try to send me a message through the game it might pop up.
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Apple - 1
I didn't know you could score '1' in scrabble? Apple certainly does break new ground eh..
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PM me if anyone wants to play WWF and I'll send you my username. :)
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my username is Disco99