Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
359 ghits for the first spelling, 16,800 for the second.
I first heard this today as a talk radio host used it, and she seemed to be using it in an eggcornish manner. She was complaining about a particular acronym being hard to understand, hard to tie to what it was describing, because the acronym didn’t seem to correspond too well to what it was describing (sort of like h.a.p.p.y being an acronym for Horrible Agony and Painfully Persistent Yearning or something, though this is my clumbsy example, not hers.)
She kept calling them anacronyms, (or perhaps anachronyms) and she was not punning, she was legitimately making an error, and I think somehow mentally mixing in anachronism with acronym. She did indeed see her target acronym as an anachronism.
So I searched. Bunches of hits, as mentioned above. Some obviously puns, maybe some typos, and probably many non-eggcornish malaprops, but still may be an eggcorn in there.
Some people are claiming that anacronym is a new word:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacronym
“An anacronym is an acronym that is so well established that its origin as an abbreviation is no longer widely known (a portmanteau of anachronism + acronym), for example scuba, radar, and laser.”
But its not in the dictionary yet, and this meaning they give it is NOT how its used in most of the google hits.
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