Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

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The NYT, er, N.Y.T. has a crazy set of rules for acronyms/initialisms.

Acronyms—which according to the N.Y.T is any initialism which is pronounceable as a word instead of by its individual letters—are styled in all capitals when they are four letters or fewer. Longer acronyms are styled in titlecase.

Meanwhile, initialisms retain periods between the capital letters. (I find this to be terribly ugly since it messes up kerning.)

So with this combination of rules we get this ridiculous result: N.F.L., NATO, and Nafta.

They used to write "Nascar", but it seems they've changed their mind on that:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/now-it-is-officia...

https://www.nytimes.com/topic/organization/national-associat...

I wonder if anyone can figure out why the N.Y.T. styles broadcast networks as acronyms? ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC.

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/20/magazine/on-language-ling...

It gets even weirder. A few years ago the New Yorker had a short article talking about SOS, the emergency signal used in Morse Code.

And they wrote it S.O.S. Which is patently wrong.

SOS is not sent in Morse like this, as if it were three separate letters:

dit dit dit (pause) dah dah dah (pause) dit dit dit

(The letter "S" is "dit dit dit" and the letter "O" is "dah dah dah".)

It's sent all at once without pauses between the letters, because it is not the three separate letters at all. SOS is a "prosign", sent like this:

dit dit dit dah dah dah dit dit dit

To help indicate this, SOS is customarily typeset with an overbar connecting the letters, like this:

  ___
  SOS

(If the bar above SOS has gaps in it when rendered on your device, imagine that it is one solid bar.)

It's not an initialism, not three separate letters, and definitely not S.O.S.

Maybe they believe the goofy legend that it stands for "save our ship".

Doesn’t it stand for “Save our Souls”? What was the original expansion?

There is no expansion. It’s a distinctive signal in Morse that’s easy to recognize.

It replaced the earlier CQD. The Titanic transmitted both because SOS had only recently been adopted.

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