#150 Earl’s Hot Meal

America is a land of shortcuts. Especially when it comes to names. I once had a French Teacher who bemoaned the tendency of Americans to always give each other nicknames. Robert becomes Bob or Bobby, Samuel becomes Sam or Sammy, Charles becomes Chuck. Maybe that was what he hated the worst, all of us whippersnappers calling his then president and legendary war hero, Chuck De Gualle. He said in France everyone got their full name, no diminutives, thank you, much too informal and lacking in respect.
So it is in our language generally. We don’t leave an acronym alone for long before it becomes the word itself. Personal Identification number, P-I-N-, became “pin” in no time, and Vehicle identification numbers, VINs, weren’t far behind. Cellular Telephone quickly devolved to Cell, Television to TV. Even the venerable Microwave oven, actually invented before the TV, went through a brief nominal stint as a Radar Range, employing the old time acronym (what I call an acro-nism) of Radio Detection and Ranging, “Radar,” in a different time and range altogether.
So why is it our great land of nicknaming and computer geek slacking has not come up with a suitable nickname and or acronym for URL or HTML. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. People type in URLs all the time. Web address is an alternative phrase, but cumbersome. Website is okay, but really, URL is perfectly fine as a word. It has a vowel, it has a couple of consonants. Let’s just pronounce the dang thing. How about Earl? It’ll have a flavor of nobility. Type in the “earl” for the “Queen” concert and get a good head “count.” What’s the “earl” for the “Dukes” of Hazard website? Yeah, that’ll work.
But what about H.T.M.L? HyperText Markup Language. Ain’t nobody came up with a workable short-form for it. Do you know HTML people say, or I learned HTML so I could really fix my website up good. HTML. Hmmm, quite a linguistic challenge. Normally in times like this, a user will supply missing vowels to create a pronounceable word that still includes the major consonants. Like the initials YHVH, the Hebrew symbols for the inexpressible name of the Lord, became Yahweh and then Jehovah. So let’s see, HTML. How about Hotmail? Oh yeah, already taken. Okay, HatMall. No sounds like a superstore. How about Hitmole? Ahh, sounds like a rodent gangster. Or Hut mile. No, sounds too much like a training march. I got it, Hot MEAL. Perfect, everybody likes a hot meal. Especially Earl...
America, ya gotta love it.