ABI, A Brilliant Insight!

     Okay, time for a bright, new, profound, fun idea that we've all been waiting for.

     Well, not exactly new.  It was something that I came up with a few years ago, but only shared it with a couple of friends.  Ha ha, they said, and promptly forgot it.  But now, with a much wider, deeper, profounder, more worldly-wise audience -- you -- I know that this bright, profound, fun idea will be properly appreciated.  Here goes.

     To understand this, we have to go a little deep, but stay with me.  Let us begin with a bit of the philosophy of philology.  In terms of semantics, words have connotations and denotations.  Words are names for the things they refer to, which are called referents.  To say it another way, "names yield meanings," or at least they should.

     But meanings can be complicated; and so, the word-sequences or names that we use to represent these complex meanings are often (necessarily) complex themselves, and too lengthy -- like this sentence.  What we need is a good, shorthand way of representing these "names yielding meanings."

     Could we represent them with neo-logisms, codewords, special symbols?  Perhaps.

     But then it occurred to me.  Since simpler solutions tend to be the best, let us use the standard alphabet for our symbols.  And for the sake of clarity and emphasis, let us capitalize the letters that we use for this special purpose.  If we thought about it hard enough, perhaps we could come up with a system.

     System of what, exactly? you ask.  Well, to be brief, I am looking for an alphabetic, capitalized representation of names, yielding meaning.  In information theory, we want the meaning to be preserved when we communicate.

     And so to convey the core idea, this system would have to be named, unsurprisingly, something like the "Alphabetized, Capitalized Representation Of Names Yielding Meaning."

     We could shorten this (admittedly unwieldy, if complete) system to:  A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.

     What a snappy idea!  ACRONYM!  Now there is a neologism if I ever saw one.  The system, its name and its process, all locked into one beautiful word!!  AFAIK, this idea has never been thought of before.

     Use it!  It's free!  Tell all your friends!  Pass it on.  JDGCWI -- just don't go crazy with it.