SNAFU and FUBAR

Two terms that are related by both their use of an obscenity and in their origin stories are the acronyms SNAFU and FUBAR.

The industrialization of the American military in the 1940s during World War II pushed many new acronyms into the English vocabulary.

New technologies with complicated names often leads to the creation of simplified terms like RADAR, SONAR, SCUBA.

The military has been a major source of acronyms and abbreviations and that's true of these two.

SNAFU: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up - a reference to the general chaos and horror of the battlefield.

FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair/Recognition - like SNAFU, the acronym FUBAR dates back to World War II and described a thing or situation in which things were beyond hope - although in a wartime military setting that doesn't mean you didn't have to deal with it.

Moby Dick

Before there was Herman Melville's white whale, Moby Dick, in his novel of the same name, there was Mocha Dick.

Mocha Dick male albino sperm whale that lived in the Pacific Ocean in the early 19th century who had quite a reputation. The whale was frequently encountered in the waters near the island of Mocha, off southern Chile.

The American explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds published his account, "Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal" in 1839 in The Knickerbocker and it was part of the inspiration for Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick.

Believed to have been active from 1810 to 1859, Mocha Dick was infamous for the ferocity of his retaliations against those who attempted to capture him. From the first recorded encounter near the South American island of Mocha till the fatal harpoon blow, Mocha Dick was a legend in his own time. Mocha Dick survived nearly 100 whaler attacks before he was finally killed while coming to the aid of a female whale and her calf.

Mocha Dick: The Legend and Fury

TASER

A taser (without capitalization) is a weapon firing barbs attached by wires to batteries, causing temporary paralysis. We have even turned it into a verb, as in "Don't tase me, bro!"

But I saw TASER listed as an acronym, so I did some digging about its origin.

Jack Cover, a NASA researcher, began developing the Taser in 1969 and completed the device in 1974. The "Taser Public Defender" used gunpowder as its propellant, which meant it was classified as a firearm in 1976. Later improvements by the company Taser International to make the "Air Taser," made the U.S. firearms regulator, the ATF, change the classification to it not being a firearm.

In 2003, Taser International released a new weapon called the Taser X26, which used "shaped pulse technology" and in 2009 they released the X3, which can fire three shots before reloading.

Much more interesting to me is that Jack Cover created the name of his weapon from from reading one of the popular, pulp-fiction novels about Tom Swift. Fictional character Tom Swift is the protagonist of a series of books that were similar to the later Hardy Boys but with Tom inventing what in the time would be considered science-fiction. I read a number of these books as a kid and recall his "electric rifle."

The electric rifle was a gun that fires bolts of electricity and could be calibrated to different levels of range, intensity and lethality. It could shoot through solid walls without leaving a hole, but also kill an animal or human. The globe of light that it shot was compared to ball lightning.

Jack Cover came up with TASER which stands for Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle. This refers to the weapons marketed by Taser International. That middle initial (the 'A') was not part of  Tom's name in the books, but added to created a pronounceable acronym.

"Police issue X26 TASER-white" by Junglecat - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

Sony

Companies and their trademarks and brands often have interesting origin stories.

Back in 1954, the first transistor radio appeared on the market. The transisitor itself had been invented in 1947 at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. They were a huge adavnce because they were small. They were a way to amplify signals and replaced fragile vacuum tubes, which were slow to warm up, and unreliable. 

They did not have an immediate impact on most because transistors had limited use for everyday consumers. They did have a big impact on military technology, telephone switching equipment, and hearing aids.

Bell Labs licensed the technology and the first company to market a transistor radio was Texas Instruments, But they did not pursue the market after that.

TR-55 Sony's first transistor radio - 1955

A Japanese company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo decided to make transistor radios their main enterprise. Their name was considered too difficult for the intended American audience to pronounce, so they decided to rebrand themselves with something simpler.

They looked up the Latin word for sound, which was sonus which reminded them of the English slang that was used in Japan to label exceptionally bright, promising boys - "sonny boys" - and settled on Sony as their new name.

Soon transistor radios were cheap and were snapped up by consumers, including a very lucrative and apprciative teenage audience. The transistor radio was the device to own in the late 1950s and 60s for a teen. It probably did a lot to move forward American rock and roll.

Sony went on to introduce a long line of milestone products including TVs, the VCR, Walkman, CD players and camcorders.

spiders online

Technology has pulled many new words from other fields, especially nature. I was looking through a book by Sue Thomas called Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace. It got me thinking about terms we use in new ways from technology. An example is the digital version of an ecosystem. Like a tree, that system has branching directories which all sprout from a deeply buried root folder.

Another reworked term from nature is the online use of spider. A spider is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. All the major search engines on the Web use these program. They are also appropriately known as web (more spider references) crawlers. (Also known as bots.)

lycosa tarantula

The origin seems natural if you consider the emergence of the World Wide Web (the www of many web addresses) from the Internet. But I find it a bit more interesting that one of the first search engines was named after the Lycosa kochii, or wolf spider.

That engine, Lycos, still exists at www.lycos.com/ in a very different incarnation. The engine was designed to imitate the spider’s habit of catching its prey by relentless pursuit.

Lycos, Inc. was established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos expanded, like many search services, to include email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. Lycos was the most visited online destination in the world in 1999, with a global presence in more than 40 countries. In 1996, the company completed the fastest IPO from inception to offering in NASDAQ history and the following year it became one of the first profitable Internet businesses in the world.