ACRONYMS! Improve your English. Fun free video tutorial #27: The English Nut.

Learn advanced English with The English Nut. He teaches and entertains you! Find out all about acronyms like scuba, snafu and NATO in this video.

In this and other videos, The English Nut explores fascinating facts about English, including the origin of English words in India and elsewhere, provides useful tips on English usage and, in a lighthearted manner, corrects typical Indian English mistakes. Watch the videos for entertainment--and you might just learn a thing or two as well. :)

As The English Nut, one of my goals is to interview Dr Shashi Tharoor about the English language.

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TRANSCRIPT

Episode Title: Watch this ASAP. YOLO!



Have you ever gone scuba diving? Neither have I! Nevertheless, it’s worth knowing that scuba is short for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.

Do you know what light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation is? Well, you probably know it as laser.

Here’s one we often enjoy on social media: GIF, which stands for graphics interchange format.



Let me tell you ASAP, what this type of abbreviation is called: acronym. It’s typically formed by using the first letter of each word in a phrase to form a new word. What’s common to the acronyms I just mentioned is that they are all inventions with cumbersome descriptors—and acronyms are used as a simpler way to name them. Oh, and ASAP? That’s short for as soon as possible. But you knew that.



YOLO is the abbreviation of the phrase you only live once. When these words are first created, they are often written in all caps. But over time, they switch to lower case letters. Like this: yolo.



Here are two acronyms we get from the American army: awol, which is shortened from absent without official leave. A soldier that committed this offence had AWOL written in a report against him. Later, it became a word in its own right. And you’d say, so and so has gone awol. The other acronym from the US army is snafu. Short for situation normal: all fouled up, it means mess or chaos. Actually, the original army phrase was status nominal: all f***ed up. I’ll let you figure out the full form of f’ed.



If someone asks you to give them your pin number, don’t. One, because sharing it is unsafe. Two, because pin stands for personal identification number. So if someone say pin number, he or she is saying personal identification number number. [Keep the earlier super on the screen and just add the second ‘number’.]



Sometimes, an acronym is formed with syllables instead of letters. Benelux is the economic union of three neighbouring European monarchies: Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg. Sometimes an acronym is a mix of letters and syllables: alpha-methyl-phenethylamine is shortened to amphetamine. It’s a powerful drug that you should never abuse.



Sometimes an acronym is pronounced partially as a letter and partially as a word: Joint PhotographicExperts Group, for example, is pronounced Jpeg. Other abbreviations such as HIV for HumanImmunodeficiency Virus are always pronounced as a string of letters rather than a word. So it’s not ‘hiv’ but HIV. Purists don’t consider these abbreviations as acronyms.





There are also fake or folk acronyms, sometimes called backronyms: For example, cop is said to stand for constable on patrol and golf for gentlemen only, ladies forbidden. These were made up by somebody with a sense of humour.



Organisations have given us acronyms like NATO for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.



All in all, there are so many acronyms being created, when someone tells you a new one, ask if it is YABA-compatible. YABA being an acronym, of course, for yet another bloody acronym.

Meanwhile, I’m TEN, in other words, The English Nut. Bye for now.




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