I Learned Something Today

Greetings,

I was reading this article at cnn.com about body scanning at a Miami airport.  In this article they quoted one of the people involved and at the end of the quote (but still inside the quotation marks) was the text [sic].  Now I have seen [sic] in articles before but I have never known why it is used.  Now I do, thanks to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is an awesome concept and I use it a lot, mostly to scratch those itches in my brain when I want to know something.  For instance, last night we were watching the results show of American Idol.  The mentor this week as Harry Connick Jr.  During the show, the wife said out loud, “I wonder if his father was a band leader?”  Well, my dear, there is no need to wonder when (with only a few clicks) we can know this information right now.  You can research for yourself the answer but be careful, once you are at that sight, it is hard to quit clicking on the embedded links about related items.

Anyway, I looked up [sic] at Wikipedia and discovered that…

Sic is a Latin word meaning "thus", "so", "as such", or "in such a manner"

Basically it is used in quotes when the quoted item might appear to be a mistake (typo, bad english, etc) to emphasize that they know the quoted text appears odd but it really is what was said.  At the bottom of the article, it mentions that…

On occasion, sic has been misidentified as an abbreviation for "said in context", "spelled in context", "said in copy", "spelling is correct", "spelled incorrectly" and other phrases. These are all backronyms from sic.

Then of course I wondered, what is a “backronym” exactly?  Thankfully, there is an article in Wikipedia for that as well.  A backronym is an acronym where the acronym letters are thought of first and then the words that make up the acronym.  The example that I am most familiar with is FORD (either First On Race Day or the negative Fix Or Repaired Daily or Found On Road Dead).  So I have used backronyms my entire life probably but not known it (or that they had a name).

I thought I might be done with my Wikipedia romp but at the bottom of the backronym article there was…

See also: Retronym

Great, now I have to know what a retronym is!  It turns out I have been using retronyms my whole life as well, go figure.

A retronym is a new name for an object or concept to differentiate the original form or version of it from a more recent form or version.

There are several good examples given like…

• Coca-Cola Classic: This is the name given to the normal coke after “new coke” came (and went).
• Acoustic Guitar: Before the electric guitar, we just called this a guitar.
• AM Radio: Just radio before FM came along.
• Bar Soap, Dirt Road, Live Music, Old Testament, Plain M&Ms, Push Lawnmower, Regular Coffee, Sit Down Restaurant, and our personal favorite, Raw Milk

Anyway, I got away with only about 30 minutes lost in Wikipedia land.  This is not too bad compared to normal.

An update on the Uno games.  I don’t think the son and I have played much since my last blog. but the daughter and I have.

	Games	Score	Lead	Pace
Dad / Son	85	1,454 / 2,241	787	379 games
Dad / Daughter	330	5,778 / 7,368	1,590	447 games

I have led the game with the son for all 85 games.  The daughter was winning for the first 7 games but I have been in the lead for the past 323 games.

Jon