Phonetically Spelled Words

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ricky Fagan calling from San Diego, California.

Hi, Ricky. How you doing?

Good. How you guys doing?

Doing well.

What’s on your mind?

There was an interim newsletter at work, and it was talking about like a, you know, a work party.

And it mentioned the word MC.

And someone was an MC.

But it was spelled E-M-C-E-E.

Now, from what I can understand, I mean, that sounds like it was being spelled out phonetically.

But when I asked other people, they said MC stands for, you know, Master of Ceremony.

So I thought it was really weird and I was kind of confused about it.

So I wanted to bring it to your guys’ attention and see what you guys could do.

So M-C-E-M-C-E-E?

That’s right.

It’s what we call a phoneticized initialism.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there are other examples of it.

I mean, if you think of the MC at this event, and maybe there was a DJ, right?

Right.

D-E-E-J-A-Y.

Yeah.

What might surprise you, all of the letters of the alphabet can be spelled.

So they all actually have a way to spell the letter, which in turn, that letter actually spells other words.

You may have a member.

Yeah.

Maybe you have a member of your family who’s a member of the JCs.

J-A-Y-C-E-E.

The most common one, which most people know, is OK.

You can either spell it as the letters O and K, or you can spell it as the letter O-K-A-Y.

-huh.

So it’s just another way we do weird things with the language.

Oh, my favorite one.

My favorite?

Is it the restaurant?

No, but that’s a good one, too.

All right.

Arby’s.

Mine is C-3PO.

Of course.

Yeah, that’s a good one, right?

If you ever read the novelizations of the books, they spell it out, but they don’t spell it according to the traditional.

It’s S-E-E-T-H-R-E-E-P-I-O.

Yeah, and if you’ve ever eaten at Arby’s, the restaurant, that’s another one.

It was founded by two guys whose last name was Raffle, so they were the Raffle Brothers.

R-B.

And it’s Arby’s.

How about them apples?

Oh, my gosh.

Well, that’s kind of cool.

Yeah.

So, yeah, these are pronunciation spellings where the letters are phoneticized back into regular words, and they become words again.

Huh.

Pretty cool, right?

That is super neat.

Not very common in English, though.

In the morphology of English, the number of words that are created this way is really short.

It’s maybe 15 or 20.

Very cool.

All right. Thank you, sir.

Well, thank you, guys.

Good luck with your studies, Ricky.

All right.

Good talking with you. Bye-bye.

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This is the show about how we speak and write.

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