What's in a word: "Backronym"

Backronym is one of those neat words that means exactly what it says: Taking an existing word and retrofitting words to make an acronym from it. (It also happens to be an example of one of my other favorite word/concepts, a portmanteau: two words blended to make a new one with a meaning that combines the two. Lewis Carroll gets the credit for using that word first in Alice in Wonderland.)

Two famous examples of backronyms that come to mind from childhood are Fiat standing for "Fix it again, Tony" or Ford meaning "Found on roadside, dead." The backronym for posh--"port outbound, starboard home"--is falsely believed to derive from the location of wealthy passengers' berths on trips between England and India. More likely, it was derived from slang for money.

Backronym is such a terrific word that I was surprised to see that it's a relatively young one. Wikipedia attributes it (spelled "bacronym") to a Washington Post language contest in 1983.

And if you really, really have too much time on your hands, take a spin on the random Backronym Generator.

Fugtionality

I was researching a story yesterday for a client newsletter, and came across the worst web site I've seen in years: ADHD-inducing formatting, about a dozen different fonts, underlined text that didn't hyperlink, different navigation on every page, dark background, the works. An equally unruly disaster in Firefox and Safari, and worst of all, I couldn't find or access the bio information that I needed. It was so embarrassing that I refuse to link to it here for fear of humiliating the owner.

But her sin wasn't that the site was ugly, it was that it didn't function right. There are, after all, certain things in this world that are simultaneously functional and ugly--let's call it fugtional. My first car, a faux-wood-paneled 1982 Ford Escort, comes to mind. My favorite beat-up running shoes. And surely my old business web site, a DIY hand-coded HTML monsterpiece that was never intended to survive as long as it did. It was ugly, but it was OK from a usability standpoint. (Older and wiser, I am using a professional to create my upcoming new web site.)

I didn't find the word "fugtional" in Urban Dictionary, so I'm staking my claim to it here and now.