Abbreviated

At the weekend, this post from a Facebook friend entered my feed: ‘Learned a new acronym today. PFM.’ The urge to lob in a comment was strong, but I haven’t spoken more than 10 words to this person in as many years – yes, it’s complicated – so held back from pointing out the error of their ways. PFM – more on that later – is an initialism, up there with the ubiquitous LOL, BTW, OMG, WTF and a host of other abbreviations made popular by text speak, and that are pronounced one letter at a time. By contrast, acronyms are abbreviations spoken as words e.g. SCUBA, NATO, AWOL etc. Call me a pedant, but I feel much better having cleared that up.

Acronym is a recent word, formed from the Greek roots acr – meaning height, summit or tip – and –onym, meaning name. It seems to have originated in German, with Akronym appearing as early as 1921. Citations in English date from a 1940 translation of a novel by the German writer, Lion Feuchtwanger who was known, among other things, as a literary peer of Bertolt Brecht and being one of the first to produce propaganda against Adolf Hitler. That didn’t go well for him but Lion’s story had a happy ending.

So, what did my FB friend mean by PFM? One of the internet’s many acronym – I mean, initialism – generators popped up several possibilities, including Pray for Me, Prison Fellowship Ministries, Personal Financial Manager and Pure Freaking Magic (polite form). A commentator on the post said she used that term all the time in her DC electrical class. Somehow, I don’t think my FB friend had Pulse Frequency Modulation in mind, but IDK for sure.