some nomenclatural subtleties
Language Log has a post on an issue that has beguiled me since I was a child. It discusses where colleges and universities with place names place their place names. It identifies the “premodifying form” like “New York University” and the “prepositional form” in “The University of Pennsylvania.” It tries to find a loose grammatical rule to little success, but generally in North America, public schools are “University of…”, unless they have the “state” modifier. Although it discusses how colleges are abbreviated in conversation, it doesn’t directly address the issue that beguiled me as a child.
My alma mater, The University of Oklahoma has used the prepositional form since it was established in 1890, but it is abbreviated in conversation and by the institution as “OU”, the premodifying form. It’s not “Oklahoma University,” so why are the letters switched? This switch isn’t universal, as the universities of Texas1 and Illinois2 are “UT” and “UI” in conversation. I But OU isn’t alone in the switch, either, Kansas and Colorado are “KU” and “CU.” I’m sure in all of these cases local custom and tradition trump whatever grammatical rules apply to university naming.
The post also doesn’t address the school I find most baffling of all, The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. It seems like a stretch to get “Virginia Tech” out of that mouthful. I could see ‘VPI,’ which I’ve seen used in some places, or “Virginia Poly,” like “Cal Poly.” I asked a VPIASU alumna a few years ago, and she said the adminstration decided to go with “Virginia Tech” for marketing reasons. I suppose this is less radical than Texas Tech and Texas A&M, where the abbreviations don’t actually stand for anything. One issue remains, however: why is it “and State University” when Virginia is technically a commonwealth and not a state?
1.Of course, many Aggies refer to UT-Austin as “TU,” since TAMU was the first university established in the Lone Star State. If you encounter one of these folks, remind them that their school was established during Reconstruction as a condition of Texas’ re-entry into the US.
2.Whenever I hear “UI” I think “User Interface,” rather than “University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.” I only seem to hear this spoken by Illinois natives; I always see it written as “UIUC,” which my dyslexic mind confuses with “UIC,” the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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If you’re old-school, you say UICC for “University of Illinois, Circle Campus”
Is that UIUC or UIC?
[...] Arnold Zwicky at Language Log was kind enough to post a follow-up to my post about how the University of Oklahoma is abbreviated “OU,” which reverses the order of the initials. He calls this phenomenon “covert premodification,” and his informants also identified the universities of Kansas and Colorado as schools engaging in covert premodification. Zwicky offers an explanation for the phenomenon. I think I understand what happened here: the Universities of California, Kentucky, and Oregon are referred to as UC, UK, and UO, respectively (Oregon even gets the URL http://www.uo.edu; Kentucky is http://www.uky.edu, and the campuses of the University of California have their own URLs), so Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma distinguish themselves with the reverse ordering. [...]