NaNoWriMo – Great Concept! Bad Acronym?

When I first saw the acronym, NaNoWriMo, I decided the people who organized the National Novel Writing Month needed some help.  I mean, after all, the best acronyms are, if nothing else, pronounceable.  Just how do you say NaNoWriMo?

Take the business named after its founder (Ingvar Kamprad) who grew up on a farm called Elmtaryd in his hometown of Agunnaryd.  The business, of course, is IKEA, which is a bit easier than saying, ‘I think I’ll pop over to Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd and check out the new kitchen cabinets’.

And then, you can always take the next step and have the acronym reflect something about the product, business, or service it represents.  Time to risk straining my arm to pat myself on the back, because I was part of the team that developed the Adaptive STUdent Tutoring Environment (ASTUTE).  It only took four of us, including two PhDs, a month to come up with that one.  Obviously, time well spent…even if the product never went far.

So, being the generous guy I am, I thought I would give the good folks at NaNoWriMo a hand.  What could they possibly need more than a catchy new abbreviation (money came in second in my mind).  As it turns out, however, I am not generous enough to spend another month of my life fiddling with combinations of the letters of their name.  Fortunately, there are automated acronym builders online waiting to step in and fill this void.  So, I typed in their name, hit the build acronym button, and voila!

Without dropping one of the four words, most of the possibilities the app constructed featured the word “worm”, as in the natIonal Novel WRiting Month or rINgWoRM.  Maybe if they could come up with Bookworm…  Well, it was worth a try.

As for the event itself, I think it is a great concept.  For my non-writing friends, NaNoWriMo is an annual challenge in which the participants try to write a 50,000-word novel in one month (November).  Personally, I had never heard of it until this month, and now that I have…what do you say we all meet there in November 2016?

Happy writing,
BmP