This week: Nanowrimo! And other abbreviations. Or acronyms. Or, uh, what’s the difference? We get into it. Read on!
NaNoWriMo
Nanowrimo starts tomorrow and I am...unprepared. And, rather than, you know, get prepared, I thought I'd sidetrack myself completely by looking at the word, or name, Nanowrimo. But first, unless you're as permanently online as I am, you might be asking yourself just what is Nanowrimo?
From Wikipedia:
(it is) an annual, international creative writing event in which participants attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript during the month of November
Cool. So, as I said, I'm thinking about trying it this year, but writing a novel in a month is a huge challenge and my outline suddenly seems no longer sufficient. Not that I'm panicking or anything.
So let's talk about that abbreviation. Nanowrimo has spawned a cornucopia of spinoff, alternate, and side-challenges, several of which borrow the original's naming convention. There's NaBloPoMo for blog posting, NaPoWriMo for poetry, and even NaMoPaiMo for painting model horses1.
But like with last week's discussion2 of ~punk and ~wave as suffixes describing a nascent genre, the number of challenges inspired by Nanowrimo soon outgrew the naming convention. In the six years between3 Nanowrimo's inception and its formal rebranding as a non-profit, the Internet became host to a slew of other writing and artistic challenges. At first, many seemed to try to find unique names; Nanowrimo itself began a second challenge called Script Frenzy. As these new challenges became ever more popular, however, many sparked naming conventions of their own, like Inktober, and the various photo-a-day challenges4. Even so, none of these other naming conventions have come to occupy a place in the social media spheres like Nanowrimo5.
At it's most basic level, the term na-no-wri-mo is an abbreviation. But what kind of abbreviation? Acronym? Backronym? Initialism?
Yeah, okay. There's no mystery here, it's an acronym. To sort it all out, let's take a look at Merriam-Webster's definitions of abbreviation and acronym:
Abbreviation:
a shortened form of a written word or phrase used in place of the whole word or phrase
Acronym:
a word (such as NATO, radar, or laser) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term
The only sticking point here is that you could argue that Nanowrimo is not actually pronounced as a single word. Instead, it's read as a series of syllables, each of which is actually an abbreviation by itself.
Hmm. Let's get some more definitions. From Dictionary (dot com):
Specifically, an acronym is a specific type of abbreviation formed from the first letters of a multi-word term, name, or phrase, with those letters pronounced together as one term. OPEC—or the O(rganization of) P(etroleum) E(xporting) C(ountries)—is an acronym because we pronounce it as one word, oh-pek.
and
there are hybrid forms—part initialism, part acronym—like CD-ROM and JPEG—for which one term is as good as the other.
While I'm not sure anything in there can be used to argue decisively one way or the other, it does leave us some wiggle room for words that don't fit safely into one category or another. Fortunately, Wikipedia can step in and seal the deal:
Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), but sometimes use syllables, as in Benelux (short for Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg).
Cool. With that out of the way, let's talk for a minute about why it matters.
In my view, and I'll admit I need to research6 this more, so consider this a hypothesis and nothing more, I think this is a deliberate shift away from the more standard initialism. What I mean is, I think had the challenge been established in the 80s, we'd be calling it NNWM, clumsy and awkward as that is. Instead, I think by using an acronym based on the first syllables, the creators (and initial users) were influential in a recent shift that began with local area names (Tribeca) and has most recently and most obviously apparent in celebrity nicknames and cutesy couple names. In other words, we can lay the blame for every J-Lo, and every Brangelina and squarely at the feet of Nanowrimo. And that's the long and short of it.
Down the Rabbit Hole
It’s almost November and that means it’s time to start gathering up all the “best of 2022” lists and articles and sharing them around like good little internet denizens. I’ll start this year with a trifecta of photo awards from the Guardian (with a hat tip to Jody Ettenburg’s amazing Curious About Everything newsletter.)
From the Archives
Halloween! I’ve written a lot about Halloween over the years, but never as much as back in Volume 1, 2018, when I did a full month of issues. Here they are:
It's tempting to mock things like this, but, honestly, if the internet has done one thing for humanity it's this: a disparate group of individuals who all enjoy a particular hobby were able to connect with and inspire each other to engage in a shared passion. Paint on, model horse enthusiasts, paint on.
Also, this ought to be obvious, but, no, Nanowrimo is not the first of these sorts of challenges. It merely popularized a particular subset, call it the personal art challenge, and brought it online. The trend recently is towards more individual challenges wherein progress can be posted online. These can be the standard 30-day challenges or a bit longer. Like, say, 91 Days.
My memory is telling me that, at one point, the whole "photo-a-day for 365 days" was an early, participatory meme, but I can't remember which site it was on. It is sometimes hard getting the internet to search its own history as it would rather give you what's current.
Okay, Inktober and all the subsequent ~month challenges might come close, but they tend to fall into smaller subcategories based on the styling and syllable count of the different months. In other words, what works for ~tober and ~tember doesn't always work for May and June.
AKA, if you're looking for a thesis idea...
I heard someone say NaNoWriMo out loud for the first time ever today. It really doesn’t roll off the tongue. 🥴