Monday, November 14, 2005

"Violence" update; "AIDS" awareness

A couple posts ago (Book Sale and "Violence") I said I hoped Dennis would review the movie soon. Here is his review.

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Also, this article discusses a case where a man was found to be HIV-positive one year and negative the next, suggesting he might hold the cure. My question, however, is why the article calls Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome "Aids" rather than AIDS. They seem to have had no problem with HIV as an all-capitalized acronym, but perhaps when an acronym is a homonym for the third person singular of a synonym for "to help," it slips by writers and editors.

This seems similar to the phenomenon of the term "pin number" for PIN, acronym for Personal Identification Number, where the ubiquitously common use of the term has led to English speakers forgetting (or ignoring) what the acronym stands for. And isn't it a job of the acronym to help us not say all those words? We can say "I'll just enter my PIN" so that we don't have to say "I'll just enter in my personal identification number." Sometimes when I hear at the checkstand, "Oh, just enter your pin number," I think "my personal identification number number?" I don't let it get under my skin at all, mind you, in the case of my secret little number code, I just think it's a little silly. But when it comes to AIDS, I feel like journalists should spell correctly.

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