Beware Wrong Contexts!

A Bonus Laugh

My “Words Count…” posting of July 8 was funnier than I anticipated, as a sharp follower of this blog alerted me offline.

Oops! Wrong context!

It seems that the acronyms I used, i.e., MWM -- referring to “Million Word March,” and GLM – referring to “Global Language Monitor” -- have totally different import when they show up in the “Personals.” In that context, when someone seeking or offering to meet up refers to MWM, it means “Married White Male”, and when he refers to GLM, it’s “Gay Latin Male.”

Oops!

On the other hand, if I had planned it, I couldn’t have found a better way to highlight a central point about definitions – not just of acronyms, but of ordinary words too: How well a definition works always depends on context.

Hilarious or Disastrous?

Usually, we share enough about the contexts in which we use words that we don’t need to make the context explicit. But sometimes that assumption is wrong. The result can be hilarious, or disastrous.

Dictionaries can never pin down all the contexts that apply for every definition, but they do often try, especially dictionaries aimed at new learners of a second (or more) language – those are users most likely to miss, or misread, subtle contextual cues.

MWM and GLM in Dictionaries

For the fun of it, I looked up these sneaky identity-shifting acronyms in some of the many online dictionaries handling abbreviations.

In www.abbreviations.com, I found “Married White Male” as the 3^rd most popular definition out of 12 listed for MWM, assigned to the category (i.e., the context) of “Community>Law.” My usage (“Million Word March”) doesn’t even appear there. Most popular by far is “Motif Window Manager”, found in the category “Computing>Software.”

Just the opposite applies to GLM: The definition “Gay Latin Male” doesn’t even appear among the 14 definitions there. But you or anyone can enter it, since the site invites definitions. (That variant of what I’ll jokingly call the “happy Hispanic hombre” definition does show up in some other dictionaries.) “Global Language Monitor” appears in www.abbreviations.com as the 2^nd most popular usage for those initials, in the category “Computing>software.” The most popular definition for GLM comes from Business, specifically stock exchange symbols, and refers to “Global Marine Inc.”

What is a “Word” Anyway?

In closing, it’s intriguing that this discussion relates also to my last posting (July 24) because it shows yet another way that OED and other dictionaries may violate themselves. They define dictionaries as defining “words.” So what about dictionaries of acronyms? Are acronyms “words”?

Once again, what dictionaries are doesn’t seem like such a straightforward matter.

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