(Very important person) frequently used contraction was created during World War II by a British officer in charge of organizing flights for important military leaders. In order to conceal the names from enemy spies, each of these were referred to as a VIP in the flight plan. (A married woman), Mrs. was a shortened version of mistress, a word that used to mean wife but has since acquired a very different meaning. Strictly speaking, because the word it once abbreviated has changed its meaning, Mrs. is no longer an abbreviation - unlike Mr., its male counterpart, which can be spelled out as Mister. (A strikeout in baseball) the 1860s when a batter struck out, it was proper to say that he struck. It was during this era that a newspaperman named Henry Chadwick created symbols for use with his new invention - the box score. He gave each play a letter: S for sacrifice, E for error, and so on. Since S was already taken, he used to last letter of struck instead of the first to abbreviate it: K. (A drug prescription), there is no x in Rx. In Medieval Latin, the first word in medicinal prescription directing one to take a specific quantity of a concoction was recipe, meaning take or receive. This was later symbolized as an R with a slash across its leg. The spelling Rx is an attempt to represent this symbol in English letters .. DQ (Pretty damn quick.) Abbreviation for pretty damn quick or pretty damned quick is now so commonplace that it is often written without the full stops, ie PDQ laquo ;. Many abbreviations have origins that are difficult to trace. With PDQ life is a little easier. The term was first used in The Mighty Dollar, a play by Benjamin E. Woolf, first performed in 1 875 at New York s Park Theatre. The play s money-hungry character Judge Bardwell Stote habitually used abbreviations like TTT - a tip-top time and G.I.C.- Raquo; goose is cooked . Laquo; That s right, you d better step PDQ, pretty damn quick. Raquo; Pretty damned quick was already in use by 1 875, for example, this piece from the Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian, 1839: If he showed me any of it, I d make him clear out pretty damned quick. PDQ lasted and the numerous other abbreviations from Woolf s work didn t is open to debate..O. (Body odor) 1 933 the Lifebuoy Health Soap Company ran a series of radio advertisements containing their new slogan: Lifebuoy stops B- O-. A heavy two-note foghorn warning was synchronized with the BO, giving the phrase a negative spin it has retained ever since.Day (June 6, тисяча дев'ятсот сорок чотири, the day Allied forces invaded France during WWII) D in D-Day does not stand for designated or defeat, as many believe, but simply for day. D-day actually means day day. Raquo; The redundancy comes from the common practice in army correspondence of referring to a top secret time as H-hour or D-day.
(Marking on bottles in cartoons to indicate that they contain alcohol) During the 19th century, breweries in Britain marked their bottles X, XX, or XXX as a sign of alcohol content. The number of Xs corresponded to the potency of the drink.
OK is an English expression, pronounced identically, and it appears in almost all the areas and in all the languages ??of the world, although it is difficult to say that it is actually a word or how it is originated. Whether you are in China, India, Great Britain or Italy, it is enough to say OK and the meaning of affirmative expressions will be clear to everyone.Until recently, both in English-speaking countries and the rest of the world, the famous acronym today can hear from the mouth of the Heads of State and Government, and also in the pages of literary history, awarded with the Nobel Prize. Incredible destiny for the word that have emerged from the wrong spelling raquo ;. In fact, the acronym first appeared in an article published back in 1839. in the list of the Boston Morning Post in which he referred to the person who says OK raquo ;, short for all correct raquo ;. Mistake was not at all unusual for that time when there were few people that knew how to read and write. However, there are other theories about the origin of the acronym OK and they do not all come from America. Specifically, the language of Aristotle, Ola Kala means all is well raquo ;, and even the Greeks had used to shorten the term of OK raquo ;. In Germany, Ohne Korrektur raquo ;, translated without corrections raquo ;, also shortened the same way. Swedes, however, use the term Oc aye (oh yes), which is pronounced just like okay raquo ;, and is not necessary to abbreviate it. The British public broadcaster BBC has recently devoted an entire appendix famous acronym. This is a very unusual word that sounds like an abbreviation, an acronym. But it would make its strange appearance could be the reason for her huge popularity, raquo ;...
