Is there a name for the particular kind of term-shortening where a term or phrase is abbreviated to its first component, even if that's not the important\/meaningful part?<\/p>\n
The most common example of this that I see is \"Social,\" short for \"Social Security number.\" As in, \"What's your Social?\" An abbreviation that includes the words \"Security\" or \"Number\" seems like it would make a lot more sense.<\/p>\n
I've also heard \"Microsoft\" for \"Microsoft Word.\" As in, \"I wrote it in Microsoft\" or \"I fired up Microsoft and wrote a letter.\"<\/p>\n
And \"Internet\" for \"Internet Explorer,\" though that's arguably a different kind of thing; lots of people don't really understand the concept of a web browser.<\/p>\n
Another common one: \"wiki\" for \"Wikipedia.\" Again arguably a different kind of thing; many people don't know what a wiki is, and aren't aware that there are others.<\/p>\n
It also seems to me that the \"-gate\" suffix, meaning \"scandal,\" is somehow related, though that connection may just be in my head. But it does share the idea of extracting part of a term (\"Watergate\") and using it as shorthand for a much larger meaning.<\/p>\n
I suppose these are all more or less synecdoche. One could argue that \"society\" for \"high society\" and \"the throne\" for \"the king\/queen\" are just as strange; they've just been around long enough to be commonly accepted.<\/p>\n
Still, my gut feeling is that there's something more\/different going on here than just garden-variety synecdoche.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Is there a name for the particular kind of term-shortening where a term or phrase is abbreviated to its first component, even if that’s not the important\/meaningful part? The most…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-usage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}