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From: meus0001@maroon.tc.umn.edu (William E Meuse)
Subject: BTW, IMO acronyms are dumb and commie
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Date: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 23:04:36 GMT
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 		BTW, IMO Acronyms Are Dunb and Commie

 Let me say that I oppose seeing our language eclipsed in such a 
thought-obviating manner. English has been tortured enough over the 
centuries, let's let it live in some dignity. One example of what it 
could resemble if this trend continues is George Orwell's "duckspeak". 
Another is Chinese.
 In Orwell's futuristic novel '1984' (published in 1948), "duckspeak" was 
a language concocted by government agents to demand a minimum of 
brain-activity from both speaker and listener. For example, "Miniprop" 
while easily understood as a convention, does not evoke the same 
rationalisations in the mind as does saying it out fully, "Ministry of 
Propaganda". Orwell was very consciously borrowing this technique from 
existing totalitarian systems who gave us words like "NaZi" and 
"ComIntern". Why don't you just resort to labeling people without 
Internet Access as "proles"? (No, no, don't! That was just a joke to 
those who've read the book!) At least I can't get in any trouble now for 
posting "politically incorrect" articles. (But just don't describe any 
illicit fantasies... after all, we ARE in public!)
 My second example, Chinese, is self-explanatory. A mainland 
Chinese-speaker's neural synapses are beaten into conformity with a 
system that makes acronyms out of acronyms, then turns those acronyms 
into more acronyms until there is a huge gap between what the speaker 
says and what the speaker would say if he knew what he were saying. Even 
our own term "acronym" is a Greek disguise for what would probably just 
be called a "clipped-word" in native Germanic.
 By the way, a couple years ago I visited an unnamed country which had 
just overthrown its Marxist government. At one point I ventured into a 
high school library and guess what - the textbooks were all written by 
Russians and Cubans! Would you believe there was one English grammar for 
8th graders that laboriously explained how, although English was more 
commonly associated with the Imperialist Capitalists' world, it made a 
better choice of second languages for a young future communist to learn 
than Russian! 
 Makes you wonder. 
 Cool Runnins, Ras William I  
