Friday, November 2, 2007

RAS Syndrome

Alrighty, so I guess the month of November is NaBloPoMo. Which I am pretty sure stands for National Blog Posting Month. I guess we, as bloggers, are encouraged to try and post on our blogs everyday in the month of November. Although this sounds great in theory, I fear that I will be reading a fair amount of boring posts this month. hehe

I would love to say that I want to try and do this, but I am not going to set myself up for failure. I will, however, try to blog a little extra. We'll just take it one day at a time.

If you go to the very bottom of my page you will see a a button with a globe that says "Click here" or "Place Pin" or "View my guest map." If you click on that you can put a pin on my map so I can see where everyone is blogging from. Just a fun little something.

OK, so now onto my post. Have you ever heard of RAS Syndrome? RAS stands for Redundant Acronym Syndrome. It refers to the use of one of the words that make up an acronym as well as the abbreviation that stands for that word, thus in effect, repeating that word. Confused?? Just keep reading. This has always been amusing to me. The name "RAS Syndrome" is actually ironic because it is redundant itself. RAS syndrome means "Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome." A few other more frequently used examples are:
ATM Machine= Automated Tell Machine machine
HIV Virus= Human Immunodeficiency Virus virus
PIN Number= Personal Identification Number number
SAT Test= Scholastic Assessment (or Aptitude)Test test
UPC Code= Universal Product Code code
VIN Number= Vehicle Identification Number number
HTML Language= Hypertext Markup Language language

It's just something that I have always gotten a little chuckle out of. Hope you do too.

7 comments:

Liz said...

I've always been annoyed by those acronyms that include the last word, and then the word is repeated! Didn't realize there was a name for it though!

I'm gonna go put myself on the map now...maybe then Calgon can find me and take me away! LOL Have a great one!

~Liz
http://4guysn1liz.blogspot.com

Family Adventure said...

Those are things that make me laugh, too, although I had never really thought about these specifically.

Nicole said...

Oh that is funny!!

Leah said...

I never thought about it, but that's pretty funny!

Unknown said...

I have never realized how redundent somethings are. Thanks for the laugh.

shannon said...

hilarious...i love that you blogged about it!

Kellan said...

Very interesting thought - I hadn't thought about this before. I don't like acronyms particularly because I most certainly can never remember what the letters stand for and often can't even remember the correct letters. Fun post - see ya.