Happy Thought for 6 November 2026

Have a Happy Thought:

Scientists have often been criticised for the names they give to things.

Especially when it comes to acronyms. Here are a couple of doozies:

·      Captcha: Completely Automated Programmable Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (I actually didn’t know this was an acronym until doing this research!)

·      NEAR: Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, a mission by NASA to orbit asteroids to better understand how to defend Earth. Speaking of…

·      NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

·      CRISPR: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (basically how 90% of new biology and vaccine research is done these days)

 

Sometimes an acronym is just too hard to make happen, so we settle for an initialism – where you just pronounce the letters without making it into another word.

·      VCR pronounced Vee See Arr, videocassette recorder

·      RPM: pronounced Arr Pee Emm, rotations per minute (anything that spins, really, but often in engines)

 

And then there are backronyms, where someone shoe-horns the descriptive words together to make it work. Looking at you:

·      SPECULOOS: Search for habitable Planets Eclipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars

·      Laser: light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation

·      TANGOinPARIS: Testing Astroparticle with the New Gev/tev Observations Positrons And electRons : Identifying the Sources (yes this is real)

<Ahem> Apparently there is a backronym generator. Enjoy.

And yes, sometimes it is very hard to tell whether something is a genuine acronym, or has been forced into shape as a backronym.

Enter the latest contestant.

Marine biologists trying to follow the migration of herring in the Atlantic Ocean may have just won this entire genre though, with this acoustic (sound) tracking method.

You see, herring fart. Or, more precisely, they expel “air bubbles in the water through their anal duct.” This is important for tracking because the herring do this so frequently, and so loudly, that these noises can be heard up to 1km away, and echolocation can be used to track locations of schools of herring and their migration paths.

But you’re still waiting for the acronym here… May I introduce you to the “scientific” term for herring farts: Fast Repetitive Ticks.

F.R.T.s

Disappointingly, the scientists who coined this insist on saying it as an initialism, pronouncing it EFF-aar-tee.

I will leave it to you to determine whether an FRT is indeed an initialism, a backronym, or, indeed, an acronym.

 

To read more about bio-acoustic tracking of herring, see the meeting abstract Looking for the elusive fish farts: Can we monitor Atlantic herring in the Gulf of Maine with passive acoustics? | The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America | AIP Publishing

 

Thanks as always to Bethany Brookshire for this and every other bit of scientific intrigue and humour she has brought, and continues to bring to us.