When I was in library school, one of my classes was something called Basic Info Sources; it was a class designed to teach us how to use the various reference materials available. We learned how to use a gazetteer, almanacs, atlases, biographical references, and more. I was particularly fond of the instructor: she was a quirky old bird but, to stay with my avian metaphor, she was also a hoot. Her dream was to own a print copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, all $1500 worth. One time, she stressed to us the important distinction between an abbreviation, an acronym, and an initialism. For those of you who have not had the luxury of attending library school, allow me to explain: an abbreviation is a shortening of a word, such as abbr. for abbreviation. An acronym is a new word formed by the initial letters of words in a phrase, such as TITS for Treasure Island Transit System (I am not making this up). An initialism is like an acronym except that the initial letters of the phrase do not form a word, such as HTML for High Tight-assed Monkey Lickers. As you can see, I delight in the creation of acronyms and initialisms and secretly enjoy when they can be used for evil purposes.
For example, many of us in the education world are familiar with something called the School Advisory Council, which is a group of parents, teachers, and interested community members that the principal meets with to get ideas and provide information about what is happening in the school and the district. However, since School Advisory Council is a snore to say, we all use the initialism SAC. This is especially delightful when the principal is a male and tells his staff how proud he is of his SAC; how impressive his SAC is compared to other principals’; how he wishes that more teachers would be on his SAC… you get the idea. My father was also a great proponent of the acronymical insult. Oh, he’d say things like “What a GROD” and you would have to beg him until he explained that it meant “goat-raping old douchebag.” Then, if you were, oh let’s say seven for example, you would have to ask what raping and douchebag meant. Anyway, lost in the glitz and glamour of initialisms, I’d always overlooked the comedic potential of abbreviations until recently when one unexpectedly tickled me.
Although the children seem to think that we simply crawl back into our coffins, awaiting September to burst forth and imprison them, most adults understand that we do actually have lives outside of school and actually go and do things during the summer. Except for me: I seem to have acquired a training habit that I just can’t shake (although it doesn’t help my problem that my district forces you to go to bad teacher camp during the holidays if you don’t have enough outside-the-school-day training days logged up). It was at one of these summer trainings that it happened.
We were learning about ways to help children learn the skills they needed to transition into reading. They had many suggestions, one of which was using manipulatives. To those not privy to the vast lexicon of edu-speak, a manipulative is basically a physical object that can be used for a variety of purposes, such as counting, sorting, and so on. But we were at a reading training, and we were learning to use our manipulatives to teach children how to spell words. As part of the training, we actually had to do the activity that we would be using with the students, so the instructor told us to get our counters out so we could use our manipulatives to spell words. Except that’s not exactly what she said. See, since manipulatives is such a mouthful to say, she used an abbreviation and what she actually said was “Now we’ll be using manips to spell words.” Innocent enough, if you are capable of ignoring the fact that it sounded like she said “Now we’ll be using my nips to make words.”
I am a professional, so I managed not to fall on the floor laughing… especially since everyone else was unphased by what she said. But my mind started to wander as we went through the activity: what kinds of words could you spell with nips? Book and look came to mind; followed by boot and foot, good and food. I remembered how many teachers use felt aprons to turn themselves into a sort of human bulletin board and I wondered if they were going to start making them with special cut-outs so that they could use their nips in spelling. Would it be more difficult for me to use this strategy since my nips are basically pink islands in an ocean of fur? Would we begin to use other body parts as well: men would teach the letter “i” and the exclamation point, while women would be responsible for the letter v? Suffice it to say, it was one of the best trainings I have ever been to. Or at least one of the most titillating.
