mike's web log/comments

For new-to-me words this week I have a couple of acronyms/initialisms. The first is SLAPP: "strategic lawsuit against public participation." This is the practice of filing a lawsuit as a weapon, or as one definition puts it, "a lawsuit that is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition." A colleague introduced me to this term a few weeks ago, and as happens (frequency illusion), I've seen it multiple times since then. Not a new term at all (legislatures have passed anti-SLAPP statutes), but a useful addition to the vocabulary for anyone who follows the sausage-making of local policy, gah.

Oh, I should mention that SLAPP feels like a backronym—an initialism whose constituent terms were selected in order to make a word. Someday I'll look into that.

Another relatively new-to-me (tho not new) initialism is HiPPO: "highest paid person's opinion." I heard this in a Planet Money podcast about A/B testing, in which they contrasted the value of empirical testing with the traditional decision-making process that's based on the gut feel of the most senior person in the process, i.e., on HiPPO. Not that I've ever been in a room, or reviewed a set of edits, where HiPPO was the basis for a decision. Nope, not me.

Surprising etymology this week takes us back to the Greeks and their admirable scholarly traditions. I was reading something by Diane Ackerman in which she used the word symposium, and just mentioned that this involved drinking. Hello, what? Yup, totally true: sym for "with," posium derived from a word meaning "drinking." A symposium is, in short, a drinking party.

Now, I have been to a few academic and professional conferences, and have attended some symposiums. Little did I know that the folks at the lectern were not, in fact, the actual symposium; that came afterward, at the open bar. Ha.

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