"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 12/02/18 (acronyms: quango, pog, laser, sim card, care package, pelican crossing)

Just a few acronyms for you today. Such a boring word, acronym. It's got acro in there, which is the Greek for height. You find it in lots of words - acropolis, acrobat, etc. But an acronym is a word that is formed from the initial letters of other words. And although it is a boring term, it has produced lots of nice words in English. Not all of them are obviously acronyms. I am going to start with quango. We don't often takl nicely about quangos - administrative bodies connected to the government outside the civil service, usually used in associoation with red tape and administrative boringness, really. But it sounds like it ought to be a tropical fruit drink. It sounds quite nice, but it's not. It's, in fact, a Quasy-Autonomous-Non-Governmental-Organosation. So, boring is as boring does, I suppose. Pog - did any of you used to play with Pogs? I think they were sort of... Yeah, around '80s, '90s... Little cardboard discs. I'm not sure anyone knew the rule for the game of Pogs. But this one does come from a tropical fruit drink, in fact - a Hawaiian fruit drink - the lids of which provided the first discs that were used. And Pog is an acronym for Passopn fruit, Orange, Guava, in case anyone was wondering. Laser, perhaps... people know this one. It's a good illustration of why we use acronyms, because they are such a mouthful when yo uspell them all out. Laser - you might imagin a James Bond film... You'd never imagine a James Bond saying Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. That's what laser is. Sim card - you might probably guess that a sim is an acronym, but maybe not for Subscriber Identification Module. It's all about the user's network details. Care package - this is perhaps the most surprising of all the acronyms that I've come across anyway. Widespread use, especially in military. Care packages sent to soldiers at war, but also students at university you might send a care package to. But the "care" originally stood for the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe, which sent out aid in the afretmath of World War II. Finally, the pelican crossing - you can't get more British than the pelican crossing. That's actually a respelling of an acronym - PEdestrian LIghts CONtrolled crossing. Again, pretty boring on its own but once you make it into an animal, it sounds so much better.