Odeon.

Zebra57 · 681900. Thu Mar 11, 2010 8:35 pm

Qi is the fact that Deutsch, Saville and Balcon started an embryonic film industry in Birmingham. Short of money the three pioneers only had £10 left and faced bankruptcy.

They decided to put all the money on an unlikely outcome of some football results which all came up. The three went on to successfully pursue their careers.

Therefore one could argue that the foundations of the British film industry rested on the outcome of an extraordinary bet.

grabagrannie · 691014. Thu Apr 01, 2010 5:10 am

Zebra57 wrote:

vantheman · 694848. Fri Apr 09, 2010 9:40 am

I suspect "odeon" actually has its origin in a hurried misreading of a Keats poem. ;-)

(No joke: I once had a student refer, without irony, to JK's poem as "O, dawn on a greasy urn." The only thing that prevented me from laughing out loud was utter bewilderment at how clueless said student was to the error.)

thedrew · 694999. Fri Apr 09, 2010 1:30 pm

Initialisms are quite old (S.P.Q.R. comes to mind). They have been quite popular in North America for a long time. USA and OK (okay) being the most famous early US initialisms. The word "acronym" was created by Bell Laboratories to describe how it came to name it's new system for submarine detection SOund Navigation And Ranging - SONAR. However the US Army and Navy had been using plenty of acronyms before then RADAR and AWOL being two noteworthy ones.

AWOL may be the oldest, depending on your definition of an acronym. The National Biscuit Company was branding itself as Nabisco before World War I, using syllables instead of initials.

However it wasn't until the 1930s "New Deal" Era when American "alphabet soup" agencies began to show up that our modern love-affair with initialisms/acronyms began to take off.