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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.FOR THE MOST PART, we live in a highly literate, highly technological world run by highly literate, highly technological people who talk like this:[Microsoft Chairman Bill] GATES: The power of integration is important to all customers because it simplifies things and lets them get a rich set of services. It's easiest to appreciate when you get down to a small business and you say OK, this guy doesn't want to think about whose SQL is faster and whose ATTP is better and who has SMTP mail. Why not just give him a box that does all of stuff [sic] without ever exposing those acronyms? [Newsweek 23Jun 1997: 62/2] We are not quite sure what America's richest man was trying to tell us, and we imagine that great numbers of Newsweek readers at the time were not sure either.However, others of us with less economic clout also name new ideas or new situations with cumbersome periphrastic expressions or polysyllabic coinages formed from classical languages and then shorten them in one of several ways. Thus, if we work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, we may abbreviate a frequently used form like astronaut candidates as simply ASCANS. If we are students of human genetic anomalies, we may find it necessay to telescope and abbreviate something like female pseudohermaphrodite into a more manageable FERM. If we are one of the federal agents, or feds, who have to refer often to explosives made from ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, we may render the formula into an acronym and call the highly explosive concoction ANFO. Accustomed to hearing acronyms as meaning-bearing collocations of letters, a clever person among us may take a nonacronymic name like adidas and render it into A.D.I.D.A.S. 'all day I dream about sex'. Tongue tied (and perplexed) by a forbidding technical term like asymmetric digital subscriber line, we may be more comfortable with the initialism ADSL, pronouncing the letters individually and not as components of a word. However, we may also come up with a combination of letters rendered partly as an acronym and partly as an initialism, the result being something like GAPDH ("gap-dee-aitch"). Comfortable enough with a common initialism like AOL, we may confidently make it a base and add a derivational and inflectional ending to make AOLITES. When we find that our career as a cio 'chief information officer' ends prematurely, we may reinterpret cio as an initialism for 'career FOR THE MOST PART, we live in a highly literate, highly technological world run by highly literate, highly technological people who talk like this:[Microsoft Chairman Bill] GATES: The power of integration is important to all customers because it simplifies things and lets them get a rich ...

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 130. T HIS INSTALLMENT OF NEW WORDS completes the overview of abbreviationsthat we began in our last installment. The citations here are generally from the last half of the alphabet. One entry from the beginning of the alphabet (sent to us by contributor Jeremy Sayles) arrived too late for inclusion in the last installment. Since we are generally supporters of new technologies useful to the study of language, we feel compelled to highlight the acronym here in the front matter. According to the e-mail sent to us by Sayles, the acronym was invented byJohn Fogle, Creative Director of PROMOSIS, INC., of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Indeed, the acronym seems to us to be one of the many reasons a contemporary scholar should subscribe to an Internet service. In an electronic press release (12 June 1998 11:35:08), Fogle announces "the new Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge device, trade-named-BOOK" Fogle touts BOOK as "a revolutionary breakthrough in technology" since it has "no wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on." In fact, Fogle claims that "it's so easy to use, even a child can operate it." BOOK has a bright future because it is "compact and portable" and "can be used anywhere-even sitting in an armchair by the fire." Despite this portability, BOOK "is powerful enough to hold as much information as a CD-ROM disc." The utility of BOOK is a consequence of its construction from "sequentially numbered sheets of paper (recyclable), each capable of holding thousands of bits of information." These recyclable pages "are locked together with a custom-fit device called a binder which keeps the sheets in their correct sequence." We imagine that BOOK will be of great interest to librarians because it allows much information to be stored in a small space. This density of information is provided by "Opaque Paper Technology (OPT)" which "allows manufacturers to use both sides of the sheet, doubling the information density and cutting costs." Although "experts are divided on the prospects for further increases in information density, manufacturers can put more information into BOOK by "simply us [ing] more pages." The data transmission technology of BOOK is astonishingly simple:Each sheet is scanned optically, registering information directly into your brain. A flick of the finger takes you to the next sheet. BOOK never crashes or requires 421 This content downloaded from 130.237.165.40 on Sun, 23 Aug 2015 19:06:37 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions AMERICAN SPEECH 73.4 (1998) rebooting, though, like other devices, it can become damaged if coffee is spilled on it and it becomes unusable if dropped too many times on a ha...