A friend posted recently about abbreviations of the word microphone. Apparently, abbreviating microphone to mic gives him a nervous tic. For him, mike is the proper abbreviation. It is not clear if he is in the pronunciation anti-mic camp--their argument is that mic is liable to be mispronounced as "mick" (like "tic")--or if his objection is solely because (his point) we abbreviate "bicycle" as "bike" and, therefore, should abbreviate "microphone" to "mike." Except the first "c" in "bicycle" is soft and the "c" in "microphone" is hard, making this a specious comparison. If bike is using the sound of the second "c" (and it is), then the type of abbreviation must be completely different. It is a false comparison. Those who take issue with the spelling because of potential mispronunciation make a good point, mic out of context likely would be mispronounced. But that is true of many words in English.
The English language is a harsh mistress. English is built upon and borrows liberally from many languages and cultures and, thus, has many inconsistent forms. There are precious few rules that apply to all of her subjects sweepingly. This is quite evident in our abbreviations.
Mike or Mic?
In fact, the common abbreviation for microphone in audio and engineering is mic. This shorthand of mic for microphone has been used by professional broadcasters and musicians and in equipment labeling for many years. Mic was used in printed texts (remember those?) at least as early as 1961. (It did not start with rap, as has been stated by a few commentators.) Interestingly, the verb form, to express the act of setting up a microphone, seems to be written somewhat interchangeably as both "to mic" and "to mike." Regardless of which spelling is used for the abbreviation as a verb, "mike" is used for its past tense, present third-person singular, and passive voice forms.
Stoddard mikes himself before he goes on air.
The engineer miked him already.
Streisand always is miked.
Who's your daddy?
Not only does English itself have a plethora of standard abbreviations, every field has its own set (and sometimes many sets) of abbreviations. Neither the comparative abbreviations nor comparative pronunciations approach is particularly useful in English to determine how abbreviations should be formed. There are some basic forms for abbreviating, but first, here are a few other interesting abbreviations and comparisons of abbreviations in English.
mother > mom, mommy
but
father > dad, daddy
number > num
but
amount > amt
and
quantity > qty
By the way, if something is countable, use quantity or number; if not, use amount.
telephone > phone
but
television > T.V. (sometimes teevee), now TV
satellite > Sat
but
Internet > Net
worldwide web > WWW > Web > web
I owe you > IOU
Did you think the shortcut of abbreviating "you" to "u" started with text messaging (texting), electronic mail (E-mail > Email > email), or social media (SM or sm, not to be confused with S&M, although SM can be both tortuous and addicting)? Think again. The IOU abbreviation using U for you has been around since the late 18th century.
Types of Abbreviations or Abbreviations of Type?
Dropping the end of a word to abbreviate it (deli, gym, mic) is called clipping. Dropping the beginning, as in telephone to phone, is called apheresis. Dropping letters from the middle (mgmt, fwd) is called contraction. The first two (and, arguably, contracting) are syllabic-based methods of abbreviating words.
Television to TV, International Business Machines to IBM, self-contained underwater breathing apparatus to S.C.U.B.A. (then SCUBA, now scuba), and Worldwide Web to WWW, are letter-based methods of abbreviating, which, typically but not always, abbreviate using the first letter of each significant word or syllable. Examples of exceptions are extensible markup language, which abbreviates to XML, and user experience, which abbreviates to UX. But, I beg you, for all that is holy, please do not write out these using a capital X! If I see one more eX- anything, I may run screaming for the eXit.
Letter-based abbreviations that form a pronounceable word, such as scuba, NATO, and radar are acronyms. Radar actually is a hybrid letter- and syllable-based abbreviation for "radio detection and ranging," forced somewhat in order to make a memorable acronym. Letter-based abbreviations that are not pronounceable as a word (IBM, CIA, WWW) are initialisms rather than acronyms. Note that this distinction is often missed as a result of massive misuse. I suspect that this conflation began with texts that show all abbreviations in a list of "acronyms" rather than in a properly-named list of "abbreviations and acronym" or, simply, "abbreviations." (All acronyms are abbreviations; not all abbreviations are acronyms.) Nonetheless, the distinction remains.
Some shortened words and names may not much resemble their longer forms, such as father shortened to dad or daddy. These particular abbreviations also happen to be hypocorisms. Hypocorisms are words that are for or about children or endearing 'pet' names. Daddy, like many hypocorisms, also adds a softening, singsongy -y sound at the end.
The mutability of English also is apparent in abbreviations. Dropping the periods in abbreviations is common in technology and communications, and it is becoming more common in the mainstream and academia. We now write PhD, NATO, and USA. But keep the periods in U.S. (US is a magazine, not a country.) Similarly, abbreviations, particularly acronyms, that do not represent a proper noun generally now are written in lowercase instead of uppercase letters. Hence, we have radar, scuba, laser, and pin instead of their unnecessarily bulky predecessors. Likewise, proper-name acronyms are moving toward only an initial capital (Unicef, Peta, and Fema).
And about those text shortcuts? That's TMI 4 2nite. BB4N.
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