I've never initiated a chat before, but this is a quasi-question and an experiment in how this chat stuff works. OED defines "Snafu" as an acronym for "Situation normal all fouled (or fucked) up." Is OED just being polite? Shouldn't this be written, "Situation normal all fucked (or fouled) up?"
I find it hard to believe that "Situation normal all fouled up" predated the more explicit alternative.
@RaceYouAnytime I guess I'm skeptical that the OED defines it this way. The dictionaries I have to hand don't define "snafu" that way. They define it as a mess, a badly confused situation, etc. They cover the word's origin as an acronym in the etymology, not in the definition. And this is probably reflective of reality: surely there are many people who know and use the word without knowing its etymology.
There is a difference between lexical record and vernacular. 'Boughten' for instance, does not even register on the hash table in iOS spell check. Proper is to broad. Typical? Does not register well... there are no hard rules here...
@tchrist Different subject: We have a question covering the origin of "snafu" with broken links to primary sources. As a stopgap I dropped in a couple of "wayback machine" links. Do we have a standard solution?
Wireless World
Here's the start of the story Callithumpian found in Wireless World (possibly volume 88, 1982):
In your February issue, Pat Hawker mentions "SNAFU" as a coinage of War II. I think he and your readers may be interested to know its pre-war origin.
During the said war it wa...
@JasonBourne And then presumably you will be Bourne again.
@MetaEd Today I've learned that programmers can mistake Apple's iOS spellchecker for the dictionary of record. While there can be no doubt that sifting through the lexical record becomes dramatically easier if to do so requires nothing more than an O(1) hash table lookup of a headword, it also becomes dramatically less useful, less interesting, and less nuanced than the traditional sense of that term.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 But if it's not a noun, it's certainly close to being one, in sentences such as "many believe he died and was replaced by a body double".
Is that an elision ("many people") or is "many" a noun there?
@MetaEd I subscribe to the theory that the traditional categories like noun are not sufficient to describe grammar, and that in a sentence like that, many acts like what you'd abstractly describe as noun without being a noun.
I had read somewhere that StackExchange has a neologisms website. Is that not true? If there is no such site then I shall certainly edit out that reference. — English Student1 min ago
Can anybody affirm this for me? I did a search for neologisms, but I'm not entirely familiar with the scope of all the other S.E. websites.
There is a difference between lexical record and vernacular. 'Boughten' for instance, does not even register on the hash table in iOS spell check. Proper is to broad. Typical? Does not register well... there are no hard rules here...
Wireless World
Here's the start of the story Callithumpian found in Wireless World (possibly volume 88, 1982):
In your February issue, Pat Hawker mentions "SNAFU" as a coinage of War II. I think he and your readers may be interested to know its pre-war origin.
During the said war it wa...
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…