Word: romanus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hooked on the Army's version of Ding-Dong School. Unwittingly, they are participants in one of the few radical advances in teaching the arts of war made since the days when Julius Caesar's centurions were bawling out greenhorns as they learned the goose-stepping passus Romanus. Replacing hoary drill instructors are cool specialists; no longer mechanical spiels learned by rote and replete with undigested, ill-pronounced jargon, lessons are couched in the G.I.s' everyday language; small items of equipment once invisible to troopers at the back of the class can now be magnified...
More blight than bright, the new acronyms are a kind of regression. They do not really enrich the language because they are words already. Still, they cap a fine old tradition that probably began with the Romans' SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus). Britons in the 19th century, for example, contributed posh (port out, starboard home), a way to remember the breeze-cooled side on Indiabound ships. Acronyms first picked up speed in World War I with such coinages as Anzac, for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps, AWOL, for absent without official leave, and asdic (Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee...