Thursday, January 24, 2013

Backronyms and Dysphemisms

My brother's wife just had a beautiful baby. Their first. (I know she's beautiful because I was a Lucky Auntie and got to go visit her last weekend...)

They are both crazy in love with their baby. (As is fitting, right, correct, and expected.)

As you know, nicknames run rampant in our family. My brother decided to add the diminunitive "foos" to his baby's name. "Beautiful M-foos," he'd say, while raptly looking at her little Yoda face scrunch and squirm and "o" beautifully in her sleep. "Pretty M-foos," he'd say as he held her in his arms. "Mad M-foos," he'd say when he was changing her diaper and she was screaming.

I was helping put together the baby stroller when it occurred to me that maybe "foos" was an acronym. This occurred to me because J and I have a mutual friend who is always trying to come up with the very best acronym for a particular nonsense: fufb. "found under fried bread", for example.

"Foos...foos..." my brain niggled at it for a minute. What could it stand for?

Aha! I triumphantly looked at N and proclaimed: "First of our...spawn!"

It seemed he was taken aback a bit. His beautiful M-foos, reduced to...spawn?!?!??!?!

Then he told me about backronyms. I figured this in concept, of course, but didn't know there was an actual name for it. (Linguists, feel free to cringe here. I know I did.)

Backronym AND dysphemism, all in one: FTW!