Nameless flies

When I moved up from a home computer to a personal computer 15 years ago, I sought advice from its builder.

When I moved up from a home computer to a personal computer 15 years ago, I sought advice from its builder. I asked to be told what Dee Oh Ess was and was met with a patient, 8220;Dos means Disk Operating System and that is8230;8221;. With the syllable DOS flying around, it took months to escape the thought of the doss houses I had encountered in the works of Dickens.

8220;Here8217;s your Pee Oh Dee,8221; flummoxed me, because what the courier chappie held out was a small pink slip which had nothing to do with peas. In time I understood that what was a receipt is now Proof Of Delivery. Progress will ensure that it is not pronounced as three separate letters but as 8220;pod8221;.

If you have an Oh Dee O.D. account with a bank, you are entitled to draw more money than you have on deposit. This is not to be confused with Ell Aye Dee LAD, which is a Loan Against Deposit. I suspect it will not be long before this too becomes an acronym: 8220;A new fridge, Mamma? No problem, I8217;ll just get a lad from the bank.8221;

What is known as political correctness is firmly entrenched in the field of medicine. The not very nice sounding manic-depressive psychosis is now called Bipolar Syndrome. I remember being confused on seeing 8216;STD8217; in a hospital because I thought that Subscriber Trunk Dialling had a place only in the world of telephones. I still cannot see how 8220;sexually transmitted8221; is better than 8220;venereal8221;.

Despite having heard it several times, I feel a strong unease when an air-conditioner is described with the two separately pronounced letters AC. Noun and adjective are the same: an 8220;AC room8221; means one which is air conditioned. I need not speak of the place of 8220;AC8221; in the now democratically classless but also enormously differentiated moving accommodation on the railways.

Speaking of the railways. There was a time when I travelled together with my 8220;fly8221;: at least that was what the reservation charts said. The first time this happened, I protested that I never knowingly took flies with me, nor bugs nor cockroaches. I was firmly told that 8220;family8221; meant 8220;wife8221; and that any woman with whom I travelled had to be my wife. It followed that, like any other fly, she must be nameless.