# The dreaded acronyms



## ArwenStar (Sep 25, 2019)

They are everywhere on TTF. See! Doing it already. For my benefit and that of others, here’s a list. It’s not nearly full, plz help expand!

TTF-the Tolkien forum
LoTR- lord of the rings
TH-The hobbit
The sil. -the sillmarillon
RoTK- return of the king
Hmm...
Any more?


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Sep 25, 2019)

HOME (or HoME) -- The History of Middle Earth.
Plus all the individual titles, beginning with BoLT I. I'm far too lazy to list them all!

And the books outside that series,
UT -- Unfinished Tales
CoH -- The Children of Hurin
Etc.

And people, places, things:
TB -- Tom Bombadil
And so on. . .

Edit: Hey, I forgot an important one -- SeS!


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## Erestor Arcamen (Sep 25, 2019)

EA = yours truly 🤪


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## Olorgando (Sep 25, 2019)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> Edit: Hey, I forgot an important one -- SeS!


I wasn't *quite* in accounting in the large German company I spent my entire "productive" life with, though for engineers (think "Dilbert") this difference was probably way below what their (seriously insensitive) detectors could discover. That said, _*all*_ bureaucracies (and this includes every company above a surprisingly small number of employees) thrive on acronyms. These are a subset of specialist jargon (think the medical or law professions) that does speed intramural communications, but becomes incomprehensible to outsiders (often not the least important of its functions).

I think I just forgot the point I wanted to make … 🙄

Oh right - I prefer to refer to "Squinty" (a short-lived and terminated experiment) as S-eS. 😛


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Sep 25, 2019)

"Thank gooodness!" said said the Squint-eyed Southerner scowling laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.


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## Elthir (Sep 25, 2019)

Don't forget: OTLACATEPTMAOMRTTWTSOFAMATDOTVAIM

"Of The Laws And Customs Among The Eldar Pertaining To Marriage And Other Matters Related Thereto: Together With The Statute Of Finwe And Miriel And The Debate Of The Valar At Its Making"

Some call it L&C for short.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Sep 25, 2019)

Oh, we're going to break it down as far as specific sections of books, now? OK, then:

The Lay of Leithian -- LOL.


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## Alcuin (Sep 25, 2019)

FWIW, here is a partial list of abbreviations I’ve used and seen others use. _Lost Road_ has no abbreviation: _LR_ is also used by some for “_Lord of the Rings_”.
​
LongShortThe HobbitTHFellowship of the RingFotRTwo TowersTTReturn of the KingRotKLord of the RingsLotRRoad Goes Ever OnRGEOSilmarillionSilUnfinished TalesUTLetters of JRR TolkienLettersBook of Lost Tales IBoLT1Book of Lost Tales IIBoLT2Lays of BeleriandLoBShaping of Middle-EarthSoMELost RoadLost RoadReturn of the ShadowRotSTreason of IsengardToIWar of the RingWotRSauron DefeatedSDWar of the JewelsWotJMorgoth’s RingMR[/u]Peoples of Middle-EarthPoMEHistory of Middle-EarthHoMEChildren of HúrinCoHBeren and LúthienBaLFall of GondolinFoGTolkien: A BiographyBIOAtlas of Middle-EarthAoMEReader's CompanionRCTolkien: Artist and IllustratorTA&IThe Annotated HobbitTAHThe Adventures of Tom BombadilATB


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## Olorgando (Sep 25, 2019)

My favorite is WWW.
Spoken in English "doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou", or nine syllables.
World Wide Web has three … 🤣
In German it's "weh weh weh" (pronounced kind of like "way way way" without the diphthong).
How did the Anglo-Saxons ever arrive at that "double-" term?
Or is it the fault of those pesky Normans (descendants of Vikings with lousy navigational skills, speaking bad French)?


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Sep 25, 2019)

Alcuin said:


> FWIW, here is a partial list of abbreviations


Ah, thanks for that very useful list; when the conversation becomes arcane, I'll be sure to LoB SoME!


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## Olorgando (Sep 25, 2019)

Alcuin said:


> FWIW, here is a partial list of abbreviations I’ve used and seen others use. _Lost Road_ has no abbreviation: _LR_ is also used by some for “_Lord of the Rings_”.


I'm thinking: shouldn't anything containing "Middle-earth" in its abbreviation, like the History, be abbreviated **Me, so here HoMe?
Middle Earth and the like are cases for the "(sic)" comment … 🤔


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Sep 25, 2019)

Olorgando said:


> How did the Anglo-Saxons ever arrive at that "double-" term?


Here's a brief note:









w | Etymology, origin and meaning of w by etymonline


W Meaning: "w" sound, and wyn disappeared c. 1300. -W- is not properly a letter in the modern French alphabet, and… See origin and meaning of w.




www.etymonline.com





Mention of Latin reminds me that Julius Caesar, if he ever said his famous epigram aloud, likely said "Weeny, Weedy, Weeky" -- which may account for his assassination.

As for syllables, it always annoyed me that TV show ER Docs spout lines like "GSW to the upper chest"; I can see it saves time and space written on a chart, but not when spoken. Saying "gunshot wound" is two syllables shorter; even pronouncing it as "dubya" (something I assume no self-respecting doctor would ever do) only shortens it by one syllable.


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## Ithilethiel (Sep 26, 2019)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> "Thank gooodness!" said said the Squint-eyed Southerner scowling laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.



And SeS is the infamous Squint-eyed Southerner as it relates to this forum.


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## CirdanLinweilin (Sep 26, 2019)

ArwenStar said:


> They are everywhere on TTF. See! Doing it already. For my benefit and that of others, here’s a list. It’s not nearly full, plz help expand!
> 
> TTF-the Tolkien forum
> LoTR- lord of the rings
> ...


I'm CL










CL


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## Olorgando (Sep 27, 2019)

Ithilethiel said:


> And SeS is the infamous Squint-eyed Southerner as it relates to this forum.


or S-eS … 😁


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## Elthir (Sep 27, 2019)

Or SSS-eSSSSS in Gollum-ssspeak.


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## Olorgando (Sep 27, 2019)

Galin said:


> Or SSS-eSSSSS in Gollum-ssspeak.


Bad, *very* bad idea … 
(OK, granted, I needed to give the display of my notebook a good cleaning anyway …) 😖


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## ArwenStar (Sep 27, 2019)

And there’s CoE. Can anyone guess what that is?
(I know the answer 🙂 )


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## Alcuin (Sep 27, 2019)

ArwenStar said:


> And there’s CoE. Can anyone guess what that is?
> (I know the answer 🙂 )


Church of England?


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## ArwenStar (Sep 27, 2019)

Nope... 🙂


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## Alcuin (Sep 27, 2019)

Church of Euthanasia?


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## Alcuin (Sep 27, 2019)

Cost of Equity?

Conservation of Energy?

Council of Europe?


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## Starbrow (Sep 27, 2019)

City of Elves?
Count of Essen?
Carton of Eggs?


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## Elthir (Sep 27, 2019)

Children of Ham?

Sorry, that's CoH


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## Olorgando (Sep 27, 2019)

Keep this up and I predict ArwenStar will shoot back with a "Cacophony of Emojis"! 😄


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## Alcuin (Sep 28, 2019)

Ah, of course! *C*ouncil *o*f *E*lrond!

“Too simple for a learned lore-master in these suspicious days.” And too hard for me.


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## Olorgando (Sep 28, 2019)

Alcuin said:


> “Too simple for a learned lore-master in these suspicious days.”


*HEY!* That's *my* line!!! I hereby wish to register my strongest disapproval of the PJ-ish bad habit of shifting dialog between characters without proper source references!
_*goes into the corner to pout and sulk for a minute* 😣_


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## ArwenStar (Sep 29, 2019)

Alcuin said:


> Church of Euthanasia?


No! 🙂 


Alcuin said:


> Cost of Equity?
> 
> Conservation of Energy?
> 
> Council of Europe?


Not quite... 😀


Starbrow said:


> City of Elves?
> Count of Essen?
> Carton of Eggs?


*shakes head*😄


Galin said:


> Children of Ham?


Huh?😁


Olorgando said:


> "Cacophony of Emojis"! 😄


Now where did you get that idea?😆


Alcuin said:


> Ah, of course! *C*ouncil *o*f *E*lrond!


Finally! We have a winner! Someone who has payed attention! I expected better, Orolgando! You gave me the idea in the first place!


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## Olorgando (Sep 29, 2019)

Olorgando said:


> "Cacophony of Emojis"! 😄





ArwenStar said:


> Now where did you get that idea?😆


Erm … lucky guess, probably. 🤣


Alcuin said:


> Ah, of course! *C*ouncil *o*f *E*lrond!





ArwenStar said:


> Finally! We have a winner! Someone who has payed attention! I expected better, Orolgando! You gave me the idea in the first place!


I was having too much fun reading the "guesses"!🤣
I know I'm probably one of the prime offenders in spreading the dreaded acronym plague. 😏

But just look at the acronym monster from an e-mail I received from my former colleagues in May of last year (we had lunch at the company canteen).
This is supposed to describe the business unit that they work for (one reorganization after my having left the company, they've had another by now, I could bet):

*PG SC EMEA PM BA LT*

This is the real world, folks, I am not making this up! 
Compared to those days, I have almost "come clean", but as you may have noted in my posts, I will probably never be entirely healed, become acronym-abstinent, so to speak. 😛


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## Alcuin (Sep 29, 2019)

Olorgando said:


> [J]ust look at the acronym monster from an e-mail I received from my former colleagues...
> This is supposed to describe the business unit that they work for...:
> 
> *PG SC EMEA PM BA LT*


I hope that's _auf deutsch_. The full expansion of a German abbreviation like that could be over a thousand letters long!


> Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
> - Mark Twain, _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_​


😁


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Sep 29, 2019)

I believe he also wrote an essay on the subject.


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## Olorgando (Sep 30, 2019)

Alcuin said:


> I hope that's _auf deutsch_. The full expansion of a German abbreviation like that could be over a thousand letters long!😁


Written out as far as I can decipher it, it’s 99 characters long, including space bar and stuff. But to that must be added whatever SC comes out to be in longhand, must be something new from the reorganization after my departure. 
What may have accelerated a trend towards acronyms in German is our (bureaucracies') propensity to create *word*-monsters.
The old chestnut (and certainly no longer champion) was "Donaudampfshiffarhtsgesellschaftskapitänspatent". 
Broken down and translated it means "Captain's patent (issued by) the Danube Steam Ship Company". 🥴


Alcuin said:


> Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
> Mark Twain





Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> I believe he also wrote an essay on the subject.


Oh yes, which I have in a book of collected writings of his. As a German native speaker, my reaction every time I read it is 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
An oddity about the two older books I have by / about Mark Twain: they're both in German! (For the first two volumes of his official autobiography this was on purpose, so that my wife could also read them, should she wish to do so).
They both seem to be from a sort of "book-of-the-month-club" - actually it was a book every three months, precisely each quarter - that my parents were members in at least as long as we were in South Asia (not sure about the US). They therefore show no copyright date, only the fact that they were licensed editions. The other book is "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in one volume - possibly slightly sanitized versions for younger readers. I have no clear recollection of having read these two stories, of course *the* stories associated with Mark Twain.


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## Alcuin (Sep 30, 2019)

Olorgando said:


> Written out as far as I can decipher it, it’s 99 characters long, including space bar and stuff. But to that must be added whatever SC comes out to be in longhand, must be something new from the reorganization after my departure.
> What may have accelerated a trend towards acronyms in German is our (bureaucracies') propensity to create *word*-monsters.
> The old chestnut (and certainly no longer champion) was "Donaudampfshiffarhtsgesellschaftskapitänspatent".
> Broken down and translated it means "Captain's patent (issued by) the Danube Steam Ship Company". 🥴


For the sake of the rest of TTF, there’s a German game of coming up with long words. We played it in college (I had a minor in German after three years of study). I no longer remember what the game was called, and cannot find it with Google; but some of the words are pretty neat! 

*Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz*, the 63-letter long title of a law regulating the testing of beef, officially ceased to exist in 2013. It means, “law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling”. The abbreviation was *ReÜAÜG*.

Writing out or reading numbers can be pretty daunting until you get used to it. 7,254 is written *siebentausendzweihundertvierundfünfzig*, some 38 letters. That isn’t bad: in English it’s *seven thousand two hundred fifty-four*, which is 32 letters, not including spaces and the hyphen, which German excludes; if English used “four and fifty” the way German uses “vierundfünfzig” for the 54 at the end, the English would be 35 letters. (Yoda and Abraham Lincoln would both say, “four and fifty”.)

It’s the exclusion of spaces and hyphens that makes German words so long: other written languages add them to make phrases more legible. Not the Germans! Whole phrases are comprised in one word.


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## Olorgando (Sep 30, 2019)

Alcuin said:


> Writing out or reading numbers can be pretty daunting until you get used to it. 7,254 is written *siebentausendzweihundertvierundfünfzig*, some 38 letters. That isn’t bad: in English it’s *seven thousand two hundred fifty-four*, which is 32 letters, not including spaces and the hyphen, which German excludes; if English used “four and fifty” the way German uses “vierundfünfzig” for the 54 at the end, the English would be 35 letters. (Yoda and Abraham Lincoln would both say, “four and fifty”.)


I believe that for a while and / or in dialects, English retained the backwards writing / speaking of the tenner numbers as in German, perhaps a relict of its Anglo-Saxon ancestry. French speaks the numerals in their logical order from left to right, though the tens-plus-one "vingt-et-un" twenty-one, "trente-et-un" thirty-one etc. keep an "and" in the numeral word, but not for 2 to 9. But then the French go daft with their tens following sixty, "soixante": seventy is "soixante-dix" or seventy-ten (no "and" here, oddly), eighty is "quatre-vingts" four-twenties, and ninety is "quatre-vingts-dix". But as you mentioned dear old Abe, in that one address he used the term "four score and seven years" …🤨
Some numbers trivia: I was on delegation in South Korea 31 years ago, and one thing I still remember (I only managed to learn a few crumbs word-wise, though I could reasonably read the Han-gul alphabet) are the numbers. I won't bother you with details, except that after ten, hundred and thousand, they had a distinct term for ten thousand - and the next distinct term, instead of our western million (a thousand thousands), represented 100 million, or ten thousand ten thousands. 😬
Which brings me to one of the mathematically most talented people on the planet, those of the subcontinent of India. They have some terms similar to the Korean ten thousand:
the *lakh*, which equals one hundred thousand, so they go the Koreans one better here; but then the next term is the *crore* … confusingly, this is "only" 100 lakh, or ten million … so here they stay *below* that Korean term I mentioned above denoting hundred million. 😵
I think I'll skip the -illion / -illiard confusion, before mazzly locks my account …


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## Alcuin (Sep 30, 2019)

Native English speakers often learn the reverse form of numbers as young children, though they might not comprehend them until they’re a little older. For instance, one common nursery rhyme begins,_Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye,
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie._​Like many nursery rhymes, it is of uncertain age: Wikipedia claims it is from the 1700s, then proceeds to references from about 1600: the word order in “four-and-twenty” would indicate the sixteenth or seventeenth century at the latest (1500-1700). 

I think Tolkien used this reverse form of numbers someplace, but I can’t recall for certain.


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## Olorgando (Oct 3, 2019)

Alcuin said:


> ... (Yoda and Abraham Lincoln would both say, “four and fifty”.)





Olorgando said:


> ... But as you mentioned dear old Abe, in that one address he used the term "four score and seven years" …🤨


The Gettysburg Address, as I just Wikied (I refuse to Google).
Four score and seven years … no, this can't be ...
Aragorn was born in 2931 Third Age. When he first met the four Hobbits at Bree in 3018 he was … exactly!
There is some sort of wild conspiracy theory lurking in this little-noticed conjunction just waiting to go ape-droppings viral in the Internet / "social" media!
And *of course* 87 is a special number. Like 42 ...
And to make things worse, they are obviously linked!!! 87 is *two times* 42 *plus three* … that Maya Calendar had it all wrong …


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## Alcuin (Oct 3, 2019)

The day Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli met Gandalf the White in Fangorn Forest was Aragorn’s 88th birthday. That adds a powerful poignancy to Aragorn’s complaint when he calls Gandalf out for talking aloud to himself, asking for more information: “I am no longer young even in the reckoning of Men of the Ancient Houses. … Will you not open your mind more clearly to me?”


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Oct 3, 2019)

I know they were in a hurry, but couldn't they have spared a minute to sing Happy Birthday?


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## Alcuin (Oct 3, 2019)

Olorgando said:


> And *of course* 87 is a special number. Like 42 ...
> And to make things worse, they are obviously linked!!! 87 is *two times* 42 *plus three* … that Maya Calendar had it all wrong …


I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be sententious or pedantic (though I’m both), but I don’t understand: what makes 87 and 42 special numbers? Are you making a jest? Did I miss the point?

The change in the Mayan calendar, the _baktun_, is like a change in the century or millennium in our calendar: it’s an artifact of the calendar. The 2012 scare about the change in the baktun was overwrought hype brought about by new age superstition. 

This is a jest, right?


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Oct 3, 2019)




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## Olorgando (Oct 4, 2019)

Alcuin said:


> I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be sententious or pedantic (though I’m both), but I don’t understand: what makes 87 and 42 special numbers? Are you making a jest? Did I miss the point?


Actually, given the items (nutty) conspiracy theories and / or numerology in wild flights of fancy, it was acid-like dripping sarcasm. Reductio ad absurdum (one of my favorites).
As to the monumental meaning of 42, S-es provided the answer (did you never hitchhike the Galaxy of Douglas Adams?)
Adams himself provided fodder for numerology buffs when in the second book, a possible question to which 42 was the answer was "what do you get if you multiply six by nine".
Er, 54.
Then someone came up with a solution how 54 can equal 42
Base 13.
4 x 13 is 52, plus two is 54.
So in base 13 the right answer is actually 42.
But Adams soon commented with probably a slightly pained look "nobody makes jokes in base 13!" 😁


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## Erestor Arcamen (Oct 4, 2019)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


>





https://imgur.com/WE7mBqw


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