Aloha!

Fascinating .....

wiki is from the Hawaiian word wiki wiki which means fast!

Wikis are a great source for collaboration ..... I'm realizing that I should have created one for my Battle of the Books team to share questions and info about the books we're reading. But getting something like that approved would involve too much hoop jumping.

Wikis are also scary .... students readily cite from wikipedia like it's the encylopedia. I even had students in my MLIS classes that cited from wikipedia. WHAT!?!!
At least it should inspire discussion about valid sources.

Such as the entry from Wikipedia below .... Does a backronym actually exist?!


"Wiki Wiki" (/wiːkiː wiːkiː/) is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian word for "fast". It has been suggested that "wiki" means "What I Know Is". However, this is a backronym.

backronym (or bacronym) is a phrase that is constructed "after the fact" from a previously existing word or abbreviation, the abbreviation being an initialism or an acronym. Backronyms may be invented with humorous intent, or may be a type of false or folk etymology. The word is a portmanteau term combining back-formation and acronym, coined in 1983[1] and documented from 1994:

The arrival of coeducation at St. Paul's in 1971 inspired the verb to scope (a foreclipping and conversion of "telescope") and the derived noun scoper, "one who appreciatively ogles the opposite sex." From this process has arisen an unofficial organization named SCOPERS, a reverse acronym, or bacronym, for "Students Concentrating On the Palatable Extremities of the Reciprocal Sex.
-Richard Lederer, Adventures of a Verbivore, 1994