All frequent internet conversationalists should be familiar with the concept of initialism, whereby “If I recall correctly,” is shorted to “IIRC,” and pronounced I-I-R-C. The most commonly used initialisms occasionally make the shift to acronyms to be pronounced phonetically, which then gives rise to amusing phonetic perversions; i.e. “Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off!” becomes ROFLMAO which is imported to spoken English, and eventually back into text, as “waffle-mayo.” As a result of this phonetic borrowing I, and perhaps others as well, now sound the ‘word’ out in my head.
Chloey used an interesting, and in my experience unique, initialism construction in gTalk the other day.
… because im(elitist)o that’s the only way to use said adjective.
Now, I’m curious how natural that construction was for readers. IMHO is an often used and widely accepted initialism that has now become part of the standard Internet abbreviation lexicon and has never made the jump to an acronym. Therefore, I still process IMHO as ‘I-M-H-O,’ which might have made it more natural for me parse the unknown syntax. I didn’t chunk the whole word-phrase. ROF(laughing)MAO doesn’t quite seem as natural.
Of course then this could be just pure happenstance. I wonder if this injection is more common than I know or if this is just a one-time thing that won’t catch on. I like it.
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