‘Hey, DW!’

My Initial Response

Yes folks, Doctor Who has a new logo, and I can’t help thinking of the Arthur the Aardvark cartoon when I look at it (To those uninitiated his sister was always ‘DW’). Newzak aside, the initialled ‘DW’ Tardis does show the extent to which Doctor Who has embedded itself in the public’s mind, or at least how much its producers like to think it has. Star Trek has never been known as ST, or Life on Mars LOM, not even the mighty X Factor has been reduced to TXF (perhaps there’s an X Files clash?).

DW Doctor Who does, however, join other initialled luminaries; the recognised examples I can think of at the moment are BB Big Brother (you may have found that in the evenings the less-neighbourly kids in your local area shoot at you with Big Brother guns), OFAH Only Fools and Horses, and HIGNFY Have I Got News for You. Typing the initials of these shows will bring up their respective websites on Google, so they must be official. There are many more besides; I don’t think many people would be familiar with this—they’d certainly give up trying before they got to the right combination of letters—but IACGMOOH does indeed bring up I’m a Celebrity… A far better, and succinct, example was the David Frost-hosted That Was The Week That Was, which ingeniously—as TWTWTW—became ‘TW3’ in the early ‘60s.

It is not quite an art form though, and it’s not quite universal. This is probably because initialisms aren’t always going to leap out at you. I always thought MPFC must have a football stadium somewhere in Manchester, but then the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch met my eyes and told me otherwise. CS, E, and E. No? It’s Coronation Street, Eastenders and Emmerdale. Come on people; these things are national treasures! This is probably why DW has been made to look like a police box, just so as we’re sure. Asides from occasionally being too obscure, initialisms—like the many recognised anniversaries announced weekly in the media—can be shared by more than one thing; this year the Food Network in the US launched a cooking series called Viva Daisy! If this was to be initialled, and we preserved the exclamation mark to signify that we meant that particular show, we’d get VD! I’ve never got it that way before.

Initialisms are generally quite a tricky business. For the first fortnight of having a mobile I thought lol meant ‘lots of love’ and that one of my male friends was letting me know how he’d always felt towards me. I understand wtf, but what about ftw? Fuck The What? I’d actually prefer that to For The Win, which sounds sickeningly Yuppie to me. Some crossovers are particularly unfortunate; Channel 4’s 09.00-14.00 Saturday and 09.00-17.00 Sunday scheduling slot is called T4. Aktion T4, or just T4, was a ‘euthanasia’ programme in Nazi Germany from 1939-1941 (they were freeing German men, women and children from their suffering. That is to say that they were freeing these people from their suffering if one assumes that to ‘suffer’ is to have a physical or mental deformity or disability).

This is a rather heavy thing to bring to our new DW Doctor Who. After all, initialisms are not such a big deal; no one forces you to use them, and no one should tell you not to use them either. Imagine if a person was attacking the PC brigade and suddenly found themselves being attacked in turn by the anti-Initialism and Acronym brigade; things would get sillier than they are already. Initialisms are practical (DNA and AM/PM save us a lot of time speech wise—though they have just wasted some of your time if you’ve gone to look up the Latin words that AM and PM stand for). However grating it might be to hear someone say ‘oh em jee’ in reaction to something they’ve just seen or been told, you do at least know what they mean. It’s a fairly swift way of communicating, and actually rather cool, sometimes; some people get a kick out of describing their situation as SNAFU as much as people at managerial level love to explain pretentious and BS initialisms to their puzzled underlings.

So party on, by all means…but just try not to look too smug, folks, when you have to spell it out to someone who doesn’t know WTF you mean when you initial it out.