Abbreviations

This turned into quite a long post – it would, wouldn’t it?

I worked in Government for 30+ years and one of the things inductees were enjoined to do was master the everchanging list of TLAs.

Three Letter Acronyms, of course.

Abbreviations are everywhere, and it’s a task to know which are known. I solve US cryptics regularly, and there are always a few that catch me out. E=excellent has registered, I think (no-one is A1 in the US), but the baseball ones have not. I suppose it works the other way for m = maiden and st = stumped. At least r = run is common.

One-letter abbreviations occasion the most debate since they are useful for when there’s a single letter to be worked into the wordplay. All dictionaries have lists of one-letter abbreviations at the start of each new letter of the alphabet. Do these lists match? Not by any means as much as you might hope.

Some newspapers maintain lists of ‘permitted’ one-letter abbreviations. Do these lists match? See above… To be fair, the degree of overlap is high, but various categories are accepted in one outlet but not another: IVR country markers , for example. Though even where such things are accepted, it’s a subset, and you wouldn’t get away with KSA for Saudi Arabia, unless there were bars in your grid. (Internet domain codes are even more non grata.) The lists don’t match, so if you find one puzzle never has X = xylophone, while all the others do – well, there’s one possible reason.

At the other extreme is the ‘anything goes’ stance, where if you can find it used somewhere, all is good. I once had an editor urge me to use B = boy, and, while I could see that there would be instances where B and G might be used in tandem, they didn’t seem common enough. Another editor, anxious to avoid a repeat E = English, replaced it with E = Egyptian (definitely not on his paper’s list). (Oh, yes it does. Indeed, at the time it was on the front page of the paper giving the cost of buying it in Cairo – E£. You could hardly say it wasn’t part of the paper’s house style.)

I used the phrase ‘in tandem’ up there. There’s also a school of thought that argues that certain abbreviations are only used when in multi-character abbreviations. F = Fellow always appears attached to (say) the Royal Astronomical Society in FRAS (and, for that matter, S = Society only appears attached to (say) Fellow of the Royal Astronomical). So some outlets decline to use those while others go right ahead.

Then there are the abbreviations that never seem to catch on: E = Empty and F = Full, for example. Visible more-or-less daily to thousands, yet never making the jump to dictionary-land. They’re probably more familiar than V = vanadium and h = henry.

The henry? A unit of electrical inductance named after Joseph Henry, a US physicist. The unit of reciprocal induction – the yrneh (yes, really) – hasn’t caught on enough to have an abbreviation. Scientific terms in general are under-represented – you would have thought that with all the flurry about the Higgs boson and other particles that s = strangeness might have grabbed more attention. But that’s quarks for you.

There’s the question of capitalisation, too. Is the unit ‘henry’ or ‘Henry’? The former – so the rule about capitalisation comes into play: you may capitalise e.g. ‘reading’ if you want people to not think about academic activities, but you cannot de-capitalise ‘Reading’ if the clue relies on Berkshire. So ‘henry’ can be upgraded to Henry and masquerade as a person, but that clue about Bluff King Hal and electrical inductance is a non-starter. (Unless you can wangle ‘Henry’ at the start of the sentence.)

None of this helps me remember which newspaper’s house style wants ‘University’ and which ‘university’ whenever I’m nailing a stray U (or u) to the wall.

New examples do crop up – r = rare still feels odd to me, but it’s in Collins. There again, so is r = response, and that hasn’t turned up yet. It’s also a slow-moving field – older editions of Collins don’t have the full set of S, M and L, and Chambers acknowledges only M of that trio even now. Clothing has been around through several editions of all dictionaries, I feel. (I’m still awaiting the chance to use XXXL. Odd abbreviations are fun to include: I managed to extend the range of ‘three-letter US Presidents’ by spotting FDR in OFF-DRIVE, but JFK still eludes me.)

Like most things linguistic, the idea of a fixed list is a convenience that holds the potential wildness of ‘But I’m sure I’ve seen it somewhere…’ at bay. So, as you move from puzzle to puzzle be aware that different lists have been drawn upon.

Some more abbreviated than others.

Books

Kindred and Knight: XWD: a Dictionary of Crossword Abbreviations

Conley: One-letter Words: a Dictionary

This week’s puzzle is a Beelzebub from 2003 – a very nice four-way symmetrical grid. I wonder if 28 across would be viewed askance these days (you’ll see why when you solve it).

Forthcoming puzzles: the usual Independent Fridays? For once, there’s a shift to a Saturday on 15 March (yes, the Ides themselves), but 7 March is as usual. Pedro has a Times Quick Cryptic on 6 March, and I am scheduling one of my own puzzles in the Church Times on 7 March.

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