infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

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 www.uo.edu; Kentucky is 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.

I’m not sure I entirely buy this explanation. I suspect these abbreviations date back to before widespread mass media, and, particularly, national football coverage. Considering the dearth of media and difficulty of cross-country travel, it seems unlikely that many people would confuse the universities of Oklahoma and Oregon. Also, I can identify two other schools that engage in covert premodification. The University of Tulsa is abbreviated “TU” (although its URI is utulsa.edu), and The University of Missouri-Columbia is known as “Mizzou” or “MU.” Since Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri all border Oklahoma, I wonder if this is a southern plains regionalism.

I’m not sure how useful it is to look at domain names for how schools are named, since the abbreviations almost certainly predate the internet. I’ve already mentioned that TU’s URI is “utulsa.edu,” and the uc.edu domain went to The University of Cincinnati, which has to be one of the lesser-known Us of C. It’s worth noting, also, that until around 1997 OU’s domain was uoknor.edu, for “University of OKlahoma at NORman.” (At the time, OU also had its Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City and a branch of the med school in Tulsa.) My first web page back in 1995 was at http://www.ecn.uoknor.edu/~cmcconn01, which was darn near impossible to relate to people unfamiliar with the internet.

Since Zwicky suggests that Oklahoma uses “OU” to distinguish itself from Oregon, I thought I would relate a mildly amusing anectdote. When I was a computer magazine editior, I was out in California visiting the Irvine office. Coming back from lunch, my co-worker Rita, who was originally from Switzerland, asked me where I went to college. Preoccupied with driving in a strange place, I answered “OU.”
Rita asked, “Is that Oregon?”
“Oh, no, Oklahoma. I think Oregon uses ‘U of O’.”
“That’s confusing.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, “Actually, I had a girlfriend in college who went to Oregon for two years, then transferred to OU.”
Rita asked, “What did she call Oklahoma, then?”
“OU.”
“Then what did she call Oregon?”
“Eugene.”