Malformed Acronym Syndrome (MAD)
EUROPEAN Union funding for science projects demands, understandably enough, that applicants put together a collaboration involving more than one member state. Feedback has not actually seen the additional rule that you must assemble a cute and vaguely acronymic name for your collaboration, but we deduce that it must exist somewhere in the regulations for so-called Sixth Framework funding.
For example, 51¶ŻÂțâs Brussels bureau forwards the announcement that âthe Max DelbrĂŒck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, Germany, and five small and medium enterprises have initiated [a] research project entitled the âRole of Ubiquitin and Ubiquitin-like Modifiers in Cellular Regulationâ, or RUBICON for short.â
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They crossed some line here, thatâs for sure. Shouldnât that be RUUMCR or at least RUbiCR? Our limited German doesnât get us any further â âZellularen Regelungâ doesnât help â and an attempt at forming a backronym from the letters got as far as âRole of Ubiquitin and Broadly-similar-things In Cellular On-off-turningâ before mercifully drowning.
Most of the other projects funded under the Sixth Framework have similarly cute almost-acronyms; there must be a role here for an acronym consultancy. It could perhaps draw on the pool of talent for this that exists among British librarians, who notoriously canât resist playing the acronym game. Feedbackâs favourite was their Follett Implementation Group on Information Technology, presumably so named solely because it gave the acronym FIGIT (see Feedback, 8 March 2003).
âThe Bulletin board software for online debate is now requesting Matthew Bartram to âPlease contact the Administrator if your date of birth has changedââ
No, please donât submit other examples of Malformed Acronym Syndrome (MAD). Send them direct to the Sixth Framework Unambiguous Moniker And Tagging Organisation (SFUMATO) â but not before we get the all-clear from our European partners.
THE instruction to sheep seen by Matthew Willey in the north of Englandâs Yorkshire Sculpture Park â âLivestock: Please Close the Gateâ (13 May) â prompted several other readers to ponder the topic of animal literacy. Gary Humble, for example, points out that it is one thing to tell animals to do something, but quite another to get them to do it. Hence the signs he has often seen in country areas around the Murray river in Australia that say: âStock on roads obey signsâ.
Philip Crohn, meanwhile, recently passed a sign on a gate saying âLarge savage dogs enter at own riskâ. Since there was no evidence of any large savage dogs beyond the gate, he presumes they had wisely decided to err on the side of caution, and stay out.
READING the information leaflet attached to a Diprobase skin cream dispenser, Rob Gill came across a curiosity. After telling him about storage, side effects and what to do if he forgets to use the cream, came this declaration: âDate of preparation â July 1996 (UK), June 1998 (Ireland)â.
Gill observes that it is quite common for the makers of skin creams to claim that their products take years off the age of your skin, but Diprobase appears to be unusual in taking years off the age of the skin cream, depending on where you live.
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FINALLY, we are not even going to try to name the combination of kinds of word-play in this tale from Christopher Binny. Those who work, as his lab does, on mammalian cells will know well the protein called hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1). The labâs recent contribution is the isolation of a protein that down-regulates the production of HIF-1. So one of the team dubbed it FIH-1, inverting the name to go with its inverted action.
But FIH also stands for âfactor inhibiting HIF-1â. Which is of course a nested acronym. And finally, if you expand the nested acronym you get âFactor Inhibiting Hypoxia Inducible Factorâ â FIHIF, a palindrome.
What, we wonder, will they call the protein that inhibits FIH, when they find it?
