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This has been bugging me. I think that my coworkers are wrong about something and so I thought of Away With Words and the collective brain power that goes along with one of my favorite shows.
I am sure that there are many examples, but I am going with the one that started this for me. A common acronym at my work is Subject Matter Expert, SME. (pronounced smee like the character from Peter Pan) I recently wrote a formal document that discussed the function of the people who would function in that role and I used a sentence similar to: "The SME will receive a document to review." I was corrected and told that I should say: "The SMEs will receive a document to review." The person correcting me said that in this instant there is more than one SME therefore you needed to add an "s" at the end to suggest plural.
Poppycock I say. If there can be one deer, or many deer, than there can be one SME or many SME. If you were spelling out the words then you would be either Subject Matter Expert, or Subject Matter Experts, the initials do not change so why change the acronym?
I can understand adding an apostrophe s to show possessiveness. "The SME's work..." for example but I really do not understand the justification of adding a plural "s" on any acronym acting as a noun and can represent one or a number of whatever the noun is.
Am I right? Can I tell my boss and coworkers that they are wrong? I mean I changed my usage to meet their standards (even though it is wrong) because I am the new kid on the block and sometimes you just have to do that, but when I take over, this is one of the first things I will change.
Michael
I don't really know the answer but it makes me think of RBIs which is Runs Batted In. I have seen a lot of discussion about this but it doesn't change what people in baseball say, RBIs. Also, you can't really use deer as an example because it is an exception to the rule about plural. I have a feeling you are going to have to concede, even after you take over.
Alas, it might be true that I will have to concede Dick, but I don't have to like it.
And yes I understand that deer is an exception to the general rule but English is rife with exceptions, and what better to take the exception than the creation of made up non-words. RBI as a full initialism does seem different from my example SME since that is verbalized as a word rather than the initials.
Michael Tull said
I am sure that there are many examples, but I am going with the one that started this for me. A common acronym at my work is Subject Matter Expert, SME. (pronounced smee like the character from Peter Pan) I recently wrote a formal document that discussed the function of the people who would function in that role and I used a sentence similar to: "The SME will receive a document to review." I was corrected and told that I should say: "The SMEs will receive a document to review." The person correcting me said that in this instant there is more than one SME therefore you needed to add an "s" at the end to suggest plural.
Your procedure is unclear. If the document is about the defenestration of Microsoft executives. is the document routed first to the expert in jettison procedures, then to the expert in Microsoft, then to the expert in Microsoft? .Or is a committee convened of those three experts so that they can review the document? Or do you suggest that there are five experts in chucking out, seven experts in Microsoft, and eleven in executives?
And do these people receive these documents as an FYI, or are they supposed to act on them somehow? So the various defenestration experts have to agree on which floor the the building the defenestration should occur? What if the defenerstration SME proposes a change from the 12th floor to the 19th floor, but the building-and-grounds SME objects, saying the bodies s, a health code violation, and it would be better to use the window on the 3rd floor rear that directly overlooks the dumpster?
Wouldn't it be more expeditious to send each SME his own copy? If you route one document and Jenson, #3 on the routing slip, is in the hospital from having been subfenestrata when a Microsoft executive was handled, documents could pile up in his inbox for six weeks, holding up the appropriate reviews.
Unless one determines whether an SME acts on his own or as a committee member, one doesn't know whether it's a collective initialism.
There once was a Southern Methodist Episcopal church. The Methodist Episcopal church split, with the majority being anti-slave, and the SME being pro-Bible on the subject. The ME merged with the Evangelical United Brethern in 1968, forming what is today known as the United Methodist church. I don't know whether SMEs became UMs at some point, but by 1978, UM membership was less than either the ME or the EUB churches had claimed. Instead of resolving their doctrinal differences, they simply included both the The Book of Discipline, claiming that there were no differences; I suspect those that thought otherwise decided to leave.
So if your organization is plagued with SME, you might want to update your resume.
Some others that came to mind are VIN, vehicle identification number, and PIN, personal identification number. I don't have a job that regularly uses these terms so I don't know the usual way of referring to these items. I personally own three vehicles so I have three VIN (or is it VINs) in my file cabinet. If I ever actually said that sentence I would probably go with VINs.
Dick said
Some others that came to mind are VIN, vehicle identification number, and PIN, personal identification number. I don't have a job that regularly uses these terms so I don't know the usual way of referring to these items. I personally own three vehicles so I have three VIN (or is it VINs) in my file cabinet. If I ever actually said that sentence I would probably go with VINs.
And, can I assume that you would pronounce it as venz?
Folks at the BMV call them VINs, rhymes with bins, pins, fins, tins, and wins. Your pastor pronounces sins to rhyme, but as a mathematician, sin is pronounces the same as sine, and means the same thing.
And the sine said you got to have a CRC Math Handbook to get an answer. Oooph! (Apologies to 5 man electrical band.)
Hey ... I've still got a hard copy of the CRC Handbook. Bought it in HS for my physics class. It's one of those books you just hang on to, but I haven't opened it in years. So much easier to find the info online these days. Just Google "5 km = ? feet" or "density of aluminum" and see how easy it's become.
That's probably the chem/physics handbook, about the size of a really big one-volume dictionary. They sold the one-year-old version to high school kids for something like $30. I'd like to have one, and the eyes to be able to use one. You can find all that info online, but when you need it 3 months later, they've redesigned their website and one has to hunt and hunt to find it again.
I was just trying to find out this afternoon, if I buy a 50-pound bag of bread flour, how big a container I need to hold it. It turns out 45 quarts, so 2 5-gallon vermin-tight pails, plus a couple of one-gallon zip-locks bags. Momma used to have a 78 of a guy who would tell a story, ending with "Oh, life, she do get tedious". I'd like to hear it again, but I can't play ANY record, much less a 78, and if it ever was put in downloadable form, I wouldn't know what to search for. But oh, having to relearn everything every few years, she do get tedious!
The CRC Math handbook was about 5x8 or 6x9, maybe 1.5 or two inches thick, and it cost $10.95 I got pretty good with it. I could use the six-place log tables and solve problems faster than classmates could use a slip stick, and i got a lot more significant digits of accuracy. Then, a decade later, the SR-50 came out, and I no longer had the fastest and best answer. That really took the wind out of my sails, especially because they could afford $400 HPs, and I couldn't really afford $150 for an SR-50.
I'm with the folks who say you would add the s to SME. Once, long, long ago, people would say US of A. No longer. No Rs BI. No Ms PG. No Rs PM. Once such a thing takes on a life of its own, it takes on its own inflection as well.
It is the habit of some to use an apostrophe to set off a pluralizing s, writing SME's as a plural. I personally resist that, and reserve the apostrophe for the possessive.
I confess that when I hear "8 gigs" it makes me cringe, unless it is a drummer talking about his musical engagements. In my book computer capacity is still "900 meg" and "80 gig." But I am old, and I'm hanging on even though I know the fight is lost. At least here in the good ol' US of A.
Looking at the various web pages, Walter Brennan gets credit for it, and none of the others do. On the other hand, I don't see that Walter Brennan is specifically named as the writer, it's just that the song is "by Walter Brennan." so that could be a "performed by" credit.
The Carson Robison version here sound the most like what Momma had. I remember it as being lower in tone, but our Victrola was a hand-crank model, and possibly we just played it slower. There aren't too many people ripping songs for YouTube who would have been an adult in 1948, si I', going to assume that Carson Robison originated the song.
You have no idea how appreciative I am. I grew up in a house of music. Momma had both a piano and an organ and taught lessons from before we got home on the bus until after bedtime, she played for weddings and funerals and sometimes for two different churches, and when the piano and organ weren't in use, the record player was. She had two bookcases, each five feet wide and seven feet tall, or sheet music and music books, and her collection of LPs took five or six feet of shelving, on edge. Every so often, one of those songs takes up residence in my ear, and I can't identify it. I call my sister, the musical one, and hum it to her, and she will recognize it, but not know the name, either. So when Momma gave me the gift of music, it was, in a minor way, a curse as well.
Again, thank you.
About 20 years ago, I played an MP3 of Leroy Anderson's "Typewriter" where a 16-year-old girl heard it. Cute song, she said, what's that bell for? She had never heard a proficient typist on a manual typewriter, so she couldn't fully appreciate the song.
I happen to have at my fingertips Lissauer's Encyclopedia of Popular Music in America 1888 to the Present (where "the Present" is the publication date of 1991). Here's the entry for the song mentioned:
Life Gets Tee-Jus, Don't It. w/m Carson Robinson, 1948. Best-selling records by Carson Robinson (MGM), Tex Williams (Capitol).
Pretty sure the "Robinson" spelling is an error.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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